Mehreen Faruqi Too Migrant, Too Muslim, Too Loud Allen & Unwin (2021)

The familiar declaration that Enrique Granados’s suite Goyescas—Los Majos enamorados (The Majos in Love) and Isaac Albeniz’s Iberia form the twin peaks of Spanish keyboard music is accurate as far as it goes, but it does not go far. The good intentions behind this declaration ultimately parochialize, if not to say diminish, Goyescas as well as Iberia by qualifying them in relation to other piano works by composers from the Iberian peninsula, not in relation to the varied topographies of all piano works. From an international or cosmopolitan perspective, the Goyescas suite may be suituated between Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (1874), a memorial to the work of the artist Victor Hartmann, and Maurice Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin (1917), a memorial to both Couperin “le Grand” (in particular, the French Baroque keyboard suite) and friends of the composer who died in the Great War.

Too Mean to Die is the sixteenth studio album by German heavy metal band Accept, released on 29 January 2021. It is the first Accept album to feature Martin Motnik, who replaced original bassist Peter Baltes in 2019, and rhythm guitarist Philip Shouse, who joined the band that same year. Speaking of heavy metal kingpins, when ACCEPT first launched at the end of the 70s, the metal genre didn’t even exist - at first the band could only be labelled with the (quality) seal “crazy loud and crazy wild”. Today we know that this was (and is) metal par excellence. And we also know that ACCEPT opened the door to thrash metal, inspiring giants such as Metallica. Guitarist Kirk Hammett recently stated in the German magazine “Gitarre & Bass”: “Wolf Hoffmann has a huge influence on me.“