A Krom Review

Mekong Delta Blues

Cambodia’s Krom always promise an exciting outing to the often dark and dangerous avenues of our hearts and souls, mixing up blues, country and folk with traditional Khmer vocals and harmonies. Christopher Minko’s band Krom have signed with USA Musik and Film label and management team delivering this their new album Mekong Delta Blues.

Photo: Johnathan Van smit

Krom are musician Christopher Minko and the two sisters Sophea and Sopheak Chamroeun on vocals plus Jimmy Baeck on slide guitar and Mao Sokleap on bass and keys and production duties. While they shock with songs such as Lil Suzie and Taliban Man they delight with tracks like Cambodia.

Classically trained musician Christopher Minko pilots his guitar through familiar terrain in the instrumental opener Take 2. A carefully layered track, fret-board gymnastics echo through effects units, it builds up, and finds its rhythm before disappearing, traceless but not forgotten, into the night.

Mama Blue is a blues jam with a Minko lead vocal, a woman with killer eyes is looking at us. A nice touch is the keys and the urgency to which the voice grows in fear of this woman’s gaze; tension builds, falls, and finally, Minko’s over it.              

Mekong Delta Blues sees the sisters take the lead vocals as Minko plays a solid blues sequence. The Sisters Chamroeun, well known singers in Cambodia, graciously layer Khmer lyrics over a Western musical frame and this is where the band really hit, when the two cultures meet to create a unique hybrid, a musical genre that while slotting into the World Music genre is really Krom’s own bag.      

Perhaps the strongest track on the album is Lil Suzie a melodic meditation (“Good morning lil Suzie / Where did you go wrong?”) on disappointment and abandoned hope in a love hotel. Two versions of the track furnish the record. Christopher Minko takes lead vocal in one, Sophea on the other; both versions are haunting, disturbing, bleakly promising and solid examples of this thing they call Noir.

From the Heart is another Cambodia vocal lead, linguistic flurries rise and stab above and beyond a guitar phrase that could have been borrowed from Bert Jansch. Oftentimes it is too easy to compare Krom’s music with British folk but it is actually the source inspiration that is the same for the Australian Minko as it was for the British folk rock generation– American blues, arguably the source for most Western popular music today.        

New Record.

Big City / Sin City sees Minko and Co take a wander through the big bad city, which one, we can’t be sure, perhaps all cities are all the same. Cities of the East are where human beings are abandoned, tortured, bought and sold, physically and emotionally hurt and killed; Krom’s music details this, studies it, puts a microscope to it and holds it up for all to see, whether we like it or not.     

Cambodia, A love Song desperately wants to be a pop song, that piano lick, those harmonies, that chorus; this ridiculously addictive song should be adopted by the Cambodian tourist board and made their flagship tune. 
People should stand still in the street and sing it hand in hand. 
But people often do things they shouldn’t do.         

Prahok is a progressive instrumental, keys, bass, and guitar speaking as one during this restful pit stop before the disturbing Taliban Man. On first hearing the track the listener could be forgiven in finding the lyrics too heavy-handed but this is the way Minko captains his long-tail and those on board know the drill. Taliban Man assaults you, but, really, what did you expect?    

Photo: Anya Minko

Shadow Falls is as close to country as Krom tend to swim. The waters are murky, the course unclear, “Where the Shadow falls / between the day and night / the dark and light.” There is a struggle here, conflicts in emotion and ethics, a battle between right and wrong. Decisions blurred by desire. This is a strong track with too many layers to attempt to unravel with much success other than to observe that a wound is being cut open here for our entertainment. 

The record closes with an instrumental of the title track and we are all left wondering how Minko’s dark art has married with the perpetual brightness of the sisters; perhaps there is a fairy tale story here among the despair and the dust; maybe it is darkest before dawn.   

Krom’s journey is only just beginning. Christopher Minko has the band and he has the songs. Time will tell if the rest of the world catches on to the musical buzz that has been steadily building in South East Asia over the past few years: with a record like Mekong Delta Blues Krom has every chance of spreading their message far and wide beyond the Mekong.   

Mekong Delta Blues is released on MP3, CD and Vinyl by Musik and Film April 2^nd 2016.

The album is for sale at Amazon as an MP3 HERE

Enquires: stephen@musikandfilm.com

The Beat Goes On 

Skateboarding in London and Memories of a Vacuum Cleaning Kind.

VAX was the king of the acid drop. A stunt performed by rolling your skateboard off a high ledge, keeping the board parallel with the street, and landing with ankle crushing glory on unforgiving concrete.

Does anyone acid drop anymore?

Seems so 1989 somehow.

The South Bank and Waterloo, where we smashed our trucks and wheels and chipped our decks as the homeless screamed and cursed and shouted at us through their mid-morning super-strength cardboard city deliriums.

Cold winds across the Thames, a sandwich at the Greek place where the owner challenged a gang of hoods who were robbing us of what we cherished most; our boards.

The Southbank where the city installed metal barriers blocking our terrain and in response we built a ramp from plywood liberated from a nearby building site thus defiantly grinded their metal barriers. Yes. The Southbank: The mecca of theatre, music, dance, the home of performance art.

 That was our place: Southbank.

VAX earned his moniker through sponsorship with the vacuum cleaner manufacturers who mass-produced the almighty VAX cleaning machine. Some of us had sponsors from local skate shops, some were skating for Deathbox, the British board makers, but most of us were doing it because we needed the discipline of learning an art and our homes and schools were for the most part unwelcoming.

We never questioned why a domestic cleaning firm would sponsor a thirty-odd year old skateboarder. Why should we?

Rule number one?

Never question the street.

Watch VAX go.

The ledge, the height of a man’s head, above a flight of fifteen or so stairs at the Shell Centre Waterloo, VAX wearing his battered T-shirt bearing the logo of his sponsor, rolls, teeth gritted, reaches the edge, drops... Time stands motionless as he falls, knees bent slightly, eyes perfectly focussed, the sound of victory as his slime ball wheels hit the concrete and that beautiful whoosh of poetry in motion as he propels forward. Us unruly teenagers stop grinding our respective lips to clap and cheer “Go VAX! Yeah!”

The truth, as every unruly schoolboy knows, is that the acid drop is the first trick any skate kid learns, it is as easy as falling off a log, or rolling off a kerb. Any fool can do it. A brutishly simple trick, moreover a waste of a good ledge potentially decorated with the skill of an ollie impossible, the verve of a flip, or indeed the arrogance of a melancholy mute grab; the tricks we were mastering were complex.

So why cheer VAX?

Perhaps VAX didn’t pose a threat to us? Maybe VAX would never be in the pages of R.A.D or Skateboarding, were we humouring an older man living out some deluded dream? Were we taunting him?

No it wasn’t that.

The trick that we were applauding was not the acid drop it was VAX’s life choice. VAX, the same age as many of our fathers, had made a decision not to conform, not to be one of suit wearing dudes who looked down on us as they lost their hair in upmarket bistros choking down watercress salad and studying the Financial Times.

VAX was never going to be one of those guys, he was cut from different cloth. VAX knew that the City would one day fall. VAX was living the life he wanted to live.

VAX took chances, snaked around the streets, made his own agenda.

Years later I'd got the suit and tie job and the house in the suburbs, slumped on the sofa watching some brain numbing crap there's a knock at the door. Some old fool selling cleaning equipment door to door.

After closing the door a thought occurred.

No it couldn't be.

Could it?

I opened the front door a crack and took another look...

A traveling salesman skated away...

The Beat Goes On

JAMES NEWMAN ON THE TELLY

DESTINATION THAILAND and BANGKOK POST TV are showing series of television interviews with writers and creative expats based in Thailand. Hosted by Keith Nolan, one of Bangkok's finest musicians the show is set to feature Christopher G. Moore and many others soon.

I happened to be the first person to be interviewed for the show. You can see the interview on several cable channels in Thailand over the next week or watch the interview by clicking the link below....

EDIT/ UPDATE. September 2016. Since first airing the Beyond The Lines show has now interviewed many more wirters based in Bangkok including Dean Barrett, John Burdett, Joe Cummings, Christopher Moore, Hugh Gallagher, Tim Hallinan, Jim Newport, and Jake Needham.


The Beat Goes On.