#i threes

[musickickztoo]

Marcia Griffiths *November 23, 1949

[mias-playground]

🎶 Singer and member of I Threes Marcia Griffiths

[rah909]

[afrotumble]

Bob Marley’s wife, Rita Marley, has spent more than 20 years residing in Ghana. In the 1990s, she relocated to Ghana with Bob Marley’s family. In 2013, she petitioned for and was granted citizenship in Ghana. Rita Marley now has a Ghanaian name — Nana Afua Abodea.

In Ghana’s Aburi, she also has a home. In Accra, Ghana, Rita Marley created a studio in memory of her deceased husband, Bob Marley. The name of it is Studio One. In Ghana, she runs a non-profit organization. Her foundation, The Rita Marley Foundation, supports charitable endeavors.

Nana Rita Marley started her musical career in the early 1960s as a vocalist with the all-female group The Soulettes, which performed with the Four Tops, Johnny Nash, and other performers of the time. Her single ‘One Draw’, which she released in 1982, was a major hit in Europe but Jamaica said it was not fit for airplay. One Draw was the first reggae single to top the Billboard Disco chart, according to the Jamaica Observer.

--Aloysius

[vinylspinning]

Villagers of Ioannina City: Age of Aquarius (2019)

This blog is dedicated to Bob Nalbandian: heavy metal brother and an even better human being, he will be greatly missed.

I can’t remember who recommended I check out the oddly named Villagers of Ioannina City, but I’m pretty sure it resulted from my blog about Greek violinist Alexis Zoumbas, whose posthumous collection, A Lament for Epirus, I reviewed here on VinylSpinning last year.

Like Zoumbas, V.O.I.C. draw inspiration from the folk melodies, rhythms, and polyphony peculiar to the Epirus region; yet they apply these to post-metal, stoner rock, and psychedelic forms with wind instruments like a clarinet, kaval, and bagpipe (see the interlude “Arrival,” for starters).

The results on 2019’s Age of Aquarius are both undeniably exotic and shockingly familiar, since, for all the variety of modern heavy music styles cited above, the strongest aesthetic I hear in epic-length, doom-paced, hypnotic creations like the stunning “Dance of Night,” “Father Sun,” and “Cosmic Soul” ... is ‘90s alternative metal.

Think Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, and Jane’s Addiction’s tantric/mantric precursor, “Three Days,” though, in the case of the unusually concise “For the Innocent” you’ll hear staccatos straight out of Queens of the Stone Age, adorned with that distinctive kaval sound, naturally.

I also get the sense that the members of V.O.I.C., led by singer, guitarist, and chief songwriter Alex Karametis, are, in many ways, musical naïfs: too young to fully comprehend the influences powering their songs, yet blessed by that very inexperience to mold old clay into fresh new shapes.

Why else would they evoke the 50-year-old Summer of Love with “Welcome/Age of Aquarius,” instead of declaring a new age? 

Why else call a song “Millennium Blues,” when it’s obviously a reggae, complete with backing singers that mimic Bob Marley & The Wailers’ I Threes?

And why else pattern the album’s closing instrumental, “Sparkle Out of Black Hole,” exactly on Black Sabbath’s “E5150”?

But, far from being a critique, this is my roundabout way of praising Villagers of Ioannina City, because everything’s been done, countless times over, under the sun of rock ‘n’ roll, and transcendent albums like Age of Aquarius are really the best we fans can hope for.

Alas, this is the only the second full-length the group has managed to assemble during a 15-year existence, so while they’ve since performed at numerous heavy metal festivals, I guess we’ll have to wait and see if this turns out to be a glorious one-off or the foundation for something greater.

More Adventurous Third Millennium Metal: After Forever’s Prison of Desire, Between the Buried and Me’s Colors, Dark Castle’s Spirited Migration, Dream Theater’s Train of Thought, Enslaved’s RIITIIR, Ghost Brigade’s Until Fear No Longer Defines Us, Gojira’s Magma, Gospel’s The Moon is a Dead World, Graves at Sea’s The Curse that Is, Green Druid’s Ashen Blood, Hammers of Misfortune’s The August Engine, Into Eternity’s The Scattering of Ashes, Intronaut’s The Direction of Last Things, Inter Arma’s Paradise Gallows, Isis’ In the Absence of Truth, Locrian’s Territories, Mammoth Storm’s Fornjot, Mastodon’s Leviathan, Melechesh’s Emissaries, Mouth of the Architect’s Quietly, Negură Bunget’s Om, Old Man Gloom’s Seminar II: The Holy Rites of Primitivism Regressionism, Oranssi Pazuzu’s Valonielu, Pelican’s The Fire in Our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw, Rosetta’s Wake/Lift, Rwake’s Rest, Samothrace’s Life’s Trade, Shy, Low’s Snake Behind the Sun, Sigh’s Imaginary Sonicscape, SubRosa’s No Help for the Mighty Ones, Swallow the Sun’s The Morning Never Came, Tool’s Lateralus, Trees of Eternity’s Hour of the Nightingale, Tribulation’s The Children of the Night, UFOMammut’s Snailking, Vektor’s Terminal Redux, Wild Hunt’s Before the Plane of Angles.

[nofatclips]

Could You Be Loved (12″ Mix) by Bob Marley & The Wailers from the album Uprising

[skeratch]

The I Threes