- Xylouris White is the collaborative duo of Cretan born lute player Giorgos Xylouris, son of renowned lyre player Antonis Xylouris, and Australian drummer Jim White, best known for his work with violin-driven post-rock trio Dirty Three. Mother is the third album by the pair, following on from 2014’s Goats and 2016’s Black Peak. As with their previous albums, Mother is produced by Guy Picciotto, best known for his fronting roles in Washington D.C. post-hardcore bands Rites of Spring and Fugazi.
While Xylouris White’s previous records sought to combine aspects of rock and roll with traditional Cretan music, Mother draws a closer comparison to the more progressive milieu of hardcore and post-hardcore music championed by bands like Bad Brains, Marginal Man and Picciotto’s own bands of the era. Mother exudes the same kind of heavy, brooding, and emotionally charged atmosphere, that often surpasses even the best examples of tension and release produced by those bands.
Lead single Only Love opens on a manic riff from Georgios’ lute, held down by a persistent kick drum rhythm from White that he quickly breaks up with a spitting post-punk-ish beat across his snare and cymbals. Georgios’ zig-zags across strings, alternately picking at lighting fast melodic phrases, then taking to thrashing all his strings in a melancholic chord progression, his voice bellowing out powerful and deep harmonies along the treacherous path. He gives a couple of groans that turn into a guttural wail before diving back into his last triumphantly bittersweet verse.
Not all of the songs on Mother attempt the momentum of punk music, but they play with dissonance and harmony and call and response in a similar fashion. On Achilles Heel the delicate play of White’s cymbals and Georgios’ hauntingly dissonant lute phrases and deep, dejected vocals stand out as a highlight and peak of emotional energy between the men with Giorgios’ deep baritone voice drawing dense cloud cover over his alternately sweet and spoiled lute phrases. At times the songs verge on cacophony but they always lean back into the unparalleled rhythmic sensibility of White’s drumming and the frantic virtuosity of Xylouris. Giorgos’ playing is complex but raw, on Daphne you can hear the sound of his fingers sliding across the strings and his precise dynamic playing which moves smoothly from gentle and quiet to loud and all-encompassing, lifting the music up and down without a conscious thought. White’s deep bass drum and floor tom rhythms resonate in deep harmony with the lower end of the Giorgos’ lute. A combination of snare, hi-hats, rimshots, cymbals splash atop the beastly momentum of the two players bottom-heavy sound, sometimes accompanied by the shrieking of Dirty Three style strings.
Though, it would be unfair to challenge most rock musicians to compete with Xylouris White’s combination of forcefulness, precise melodic harmony and controlled dissonance - Mother should be looked at as an updating of tradition in more than the obvious sense of incorporating rock and roll into Cretan folk music - but as taking rock and roll beyond many of its infantile attachments. Mother deprives rock of all of its electricity and excess, and breaks it down to a humanistic and earthy core, injected with Cretan virtuosity. The remarkably diverse and satisfying set of songs based around just two instruments and one voice with the occasional addition of bowed strings delivers a refreshingly warm and grounded album of impressive moving and emotionally charged music.
- Jaden Gallagher.