The title in part refers to the container ships that as well as bringing food stuffs etc, to many of the world’s ports, also bring people and their music. But this album is far from just another melting-pot fusion of all the usual styles - Balkan, reggae, ska, funk – all the usual suspects. The focus is just on the taranta (the other half of the title) - a collective term for a number of up-tempo Italian folk dances originating from the heel of Italy.
Proceedings open with just the rippling muscular sound of an accordion and a lone acoustic guitar, suggesting tasteful restraint. But then after a few bars, drums, electric guitar, violins and throatily impassioned vocals explode into life, making me relieved that this wasn't the “world music” album mired in coffee-table politeness that I'd feared it was going to be. Instead, Taranta Container is an exuberantly full-on rock and dub-steeped recording (“Ronde noe” has a nice Jah Wobble-era PIL vibe about it) of refreshing originality and power.
The final third of the album further dissects and reconfigures the form with remixes of tracks from Nidi d’Arac’s 2007 album Salento senza tempo by what the press release amusingly calls “some of Europe’s finest musical contaminators”. So “Klama” is nicely contaminated by some wheezy harmonium, and on “Ci fice lu Mundi”, London DJ Gaudi gets rid of just about every sound that defined this music in the first place, letting just the bass, drums and some flutters of ambient keyboard buoy up the vocal. But really these remixes are just superficial toyings, doodles if you will, bereft of all the drive, guts and sensuality that makes the album proper so compelling. But to end on a positive note: it’d be perfectly fitting if Nidi d’Arac did for taranta what Gotan Project did for tango.
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