Grit
- by Martyn Bennett
- Realworld Region: Europe
- Oct 2003
Reviews
It's a tribute to Bennett's hyperactive musical imagination that this confection never sounds stale, forced or pretentious.
Or anything other than Scottish, come to that.
On various levels this is an extraordinary album. The charismatic fiddler/bagpiper/dance innovator has endured an horrendous couple of years battling with cancer, and Grit - born of pain, passion, emotion and a very real sense of roots - is the emmense response. Paradoxically it's tender yet explosive; ancient and futuristic; beautiful yet violent; scarred yet triumphant; quietly reflective yet full-on dance.... Remarkable stuff.
"It took a purposeful artist to make this challenging album. We are the richer for it. Quite, quite remarkable."
Here, his mystical samples of Scottish travellers and Gaelic west coast singers fuse with block rocking beats to create something fascinating and unexpected...
After two semi-classic albums with Bothy Culture and Hardland, this is perhaps the most powerful, defiant, deeply emotional album of the year. Made in the midst of a battle with cancer, Bennett digs deep into the Scottish tradition to sample travellers and Gaelic singers, catapulting them into the modern world with thrilling beats and full-on techno. The results are mostly outstanding.
album review
You'll see that Martyn Bennett has come top of the list once more. He's a genius, without doubt, and he's taken his talents to an even higher plane with his new album, Grit. As he has done in the past, he's found songs and words in the School of Scottish Studies and put them to electronic rhythms. He's used two different voices - the voice of the Roma (travellers) and the voice of the Gael.
...there's nothing sweet about Grit. Bennett has taken the strongest, deepest, and most fundamental sounds and brought them to the fore - like the last cry of a wild beast, without translation, without gentrification. The Roma provide the strongest voices on the album, but listen to Liberation for a unique Gaelic psalm - which uses the singing of Murdina and Effie Macdonald from the 60s and the low, gravelly voice of Michael Marra reading Psalm 118 in English.
There is no-one else on earth so modern and so ancient at the same time: so true to our roots and so free in creating new sounds - and new languages.
album review
Here...Martyn has created something wondrous in terms of sound picture, genuinely breathtaking in its scope, imagination and execution and, most important, very very personal. Martyn’s innovatory approach is recognisable everywhere you listen and, though perennially challenging, supremely rewarding. In the final analysis, Grit‘s emotionally charged sequence of tone-poems is a cathartic and wholly truthful representation of Martyn’s “own reflection in the great mirror of all cultures”; it’s truly extraordinary, and – no exaggeration – without doubt an album of the year.
album review
Grit is Martyn Bennett's tour de force.
No-one else welds the Scottish tradition to cutting edge electronica so well and here you couldn't slide an atom between the elements, so well are they interwoven.
Potentially controversial and challenging in its groove-clad modernity, the album has gained the delighted approval of the singers' families, who see it as continuing the tradition. Knowing that Grit represents Bennett's survival strategy during a particularly harrowing period in his own struggle with cancer makes sense of the intensity, the deeply personal yet hugely accessible emotion in this album. Do it the service of listening with headphones. It's an astounding experience, simultaneously painful and uplifting. This is a man with a huge voice.
