concert reviews
"They are proper musicians in that they have been charming their instruments for years - long enough to embrace the audience in the splendor and mystery that this level of accomplishment can provide"
Dawn Manners, City Lights
"Más Y Más brought their sun drenched Latin rhythms to an overcast Festival Sunday afternoon - Taking the audience with them on a journey into the familiar and not so familiar and by virtue of their fine musicianship coupled with a great sense of fun they managed amongst a myriad of great acts to make themselves one of those that people remembered with a smile.... oh and the CD is pretty good as well"
Jim McLaughlin, Organiser, Whitby Musicport Festival
"Más Y Más, Latin music in the style of The Clash...they bring a unique combination of flair, passion and originality to the fore."
Cork Evening Echo
‘Más Y Más brought Latin warmth and sunshine to a rainy Northumberland afternoon with irrepressible rhythms, songs and loads of personal charm. This band works well in a concert setting: you can tell the audience would leap up and dance if they could, but there is plenty in the music and presentation to content them with foot stomping and wild hand-clapping.
Chris Pentney, Folkworks/The Sage Gateshead
It looked as if the rest of the afternoon would be lost but the Queen’s Hall opened up the theatre, players and audience carried over the gear to a full house of dripping, steaming devotees . At last on stage in a wonderful and exhilarating climax to the Gathering came the Anglo-Spanish trio Más Y Más with an hour-long gig of Flamenco, Mexican, Afro-Cuban, Reggae and more.
They were totally magic, full of humour, manic gestures and great songs. (Please, Queen’s Hall book them to come back soon.) It was a great end to the most gregarious of gatherings.
The Hexham Courant
Album Reviews
De Que Color
From the first notes the melodic warmth of Wayne Evans’ acoustic bass and Richard Kensington’s fluid percussion playing are a perfect foil to the sharper cadences of frontman Rikki Thomas-Martinez’s guitar & vocal performance. For a debut album there’s plenty here which says this band have been around for some time on the live scene.
They play as one unit, creating an easy acoustic ambiance infused with echoes of Latin America & the Spanish Caribbean and, from nearer to home, Spain itself. Elements of son, rumba, mambo, Cuban oriente and flamenco pass through the sound in a kaleidoscopic array of sounds which fuse well in the hands of this accomplished trio.
Rikki has a great Latin music voice and conveys the lyrics (he also composed all tracks here except ‘Guantanamera’) with a clarity & directness which puts him up there alongside the greats of today’s international music scene.
The material is strong, from easy crooners (‘Por Qué’) to sharp-dressed dancefloor numbers (‘Agua’) there’s a healthy range of styles and the dreamy, sultry version of that aforementioned old standard was well worth the re-visit. ‘Respetame’ has a terrific vocal line reminiscent of South American folk tradition and ‘Juana’, even with its English lyric, reeks of sexy Iberian insouciance.
The best tracks for this reviewer, though, are the opener, ‘Zapatero’ with its manouche swing, the plush salsa of ‘Mendigo’ (in sound clip below) featuring Martinez on keyboards and the title track, which is a great example of the singer’s songwriting ability.
Agarrate
The first impression you get from ‘¡Agárrate!’ is the sheer physical mastery of the instrumentalists in Más y Más. The Anglo-Spanish trio play up a storm, at times sounding twice as large and hitting those vital Latin/Afro-Cuban/flamenco beats absolutely bang-on every time.
Lead singer and guitar/mandolin player Ricky Thomas-Martinez also writes much of the band’s material and his ability in this direction is key to their appeal. Ricky pens all but three of the 11 tracks here and the set opens with a cracker – ‘Por qué Será?’ which whips in with all the acoustic appeal and chutzpah of a Manu Chao classic, with funky percussion and a measured, striding bassline.
A ‘trad.arr’ version of a Mexican song ‘En Mexico’ follows, the rhythm kicks up a notch and the scene is set. The band have cut their teeth on ( almost) ten years of live appearances across the world – most recently in front of a whooping crowd of 10,000 at the Rainforest World Music Festival, held in Borneo during July 2004.
It’s not always easy to get a live show across on disc and, indeed, the humour and stage antics are impossible to put over here. They’ve concentrated, therefore, on what is after all the band’s biggest strength – musical ability and material – probably the wisest move and certainly one which pays dividends in terms of the finished product.
There’s nothing really to fault here. The production is clean, chunky and efficient and the packaging, including lyrics in English & Spanish is fun and informative. This is Más y Más at their easy-going, likeable best, they’ll be very big soon, so get in at the ground floor.
"Más Y Más, Latin music in the style of The Clash...they bring a unique combination of flair, passion and originality to the fore." Cork Evening Echo Here’s a clip from ‘Madreselva’.
Dave Atkins – Phat Planet
