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CD: JuJu - In Trance | reviews, news & interviews

CD: JuJu - In Trance

CD: JuJu - In Trance

Justin Adams and Juldeh Camera turn it up to 11 with exhilarating results

JuJu: The new progressive rock? Only in the best possible way

Over the past five years, Justin Adams and Juldeh Camara have made two albums and an EP together, but it’s only now that they’ve got round to doing what most bands can’t wait to do, which is give themselves a groovy band name. Even though I’m a poo-pooer of most band names (they’re usually either stupid or pretentious, or both) I actually rather like "JuJu". The double “ju” represents the first two letters of Adams’s and Camara’s first names, and the resulting word has a nicely sinister black-magic ring to it. It also has the onomatopoeic bonus of sounding like the band sounds, with their heavy cyclical rhythms topped off by the sustained voodoo scream of Camara’s ritti (a Gambian one-string fiddle) - like Hendrix rising from the dead – playing throughout every track.

Over the past five years, Justin Adams and Juldeh Camara have made two albums and an EP together, but it’s only now that they’ve got round to doing what most bands can’t wait to do, which is give themselves a groovy band name. Even though I’m a poo-pooer of most band names (they’re usually either stupid or pretentious, or both) I actually rather like "JuJu". The double “ju” represents the first two letters of Adams’s and Camara’s first names, and the resulting word has a nicely sinister black-magic ring to it. It also has the onomatopoeic bonus of sounding like the band sounds, with their heavy cyclical rhythms topped off by the sustained voodoo scream of Camara’s ritti (a Gambian one-string fiddle) - like Hendrix rising from the dead – playing throughout every track.

So are JuJu the future of rock'n'roll? I don’t see why not

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