folk music
Kieron Tyler
The last minute of Found Light’s third track “Seaside Haiku” is defined by the repetition of a single phrase: “give but don’t give too much of yourself away.” Before this is the line “I’ve learned a lot from pain.”Working out whether an album’s lyrics are a form of personal reportage or if they’re about imagined scenarios is always tricky. In this case Laura Veirs has said her 12th album is about what comes after divorce, so it feels safe to assume that “Seaside Haiku” is born from past events and describes an outlook generated by what’s been experienced.Elsewhere on Found Light, other lyrics Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“The historic, the prehistoric, the natural, architectural, geological, ornithological, or on the side of its folklore, Christian or heathen – the place teems with subject matter that is as curious as it is interesting.” So the Gothic Revival architect John Dando Sedding wrote of Cornwall in 1887.Now, the county’s riches are supplemented by the third album from the Wales-born Gwenno Saunders, on which all but two tracks are sung in Cornish: one is in Welsh, another is an instrumental. Sedding’s inventory applies to Tresor – which translates as "Treasure" – as much as it does to Victorian Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
American singer-songwriter Damien Jurado is both prolific and enigmatic. His latest album follows too many to count (OK, not really, I think this is his 20th). On his own label, it's as opaque as anything he’s done, and that’s saying something.There are 12 songs, at least half of them around the two-minute mark, all opaque and mysterious, but also often fascinating. “What is he singing about?” the listener asks themselves, a sense of what’s going on elusive but also, tantalisingly, almost within reach.A concept album, then? Kind of. There’s a very loose thematic of films sets. Possibly. Or Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“The case is quite simple. We think that the policy which is being pursued by the western powers is one which is almost bound to end in the extermination of the human race. Some of us think that might be rather a pity.”This extract from a 1958 interview with Bertrand Russell opens Ban The Bomb - Music Of The Aldermaston Anti-Nuclear Marches, a two-CD set collecting music and interview snippets associated with the early days of CND and the related anti-nuclear protest. Next up in the tracklist is Ewan MacColl & Peggy Seeger’s “March With us Today” which exhorts listeners to come to Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In these meta times when everything – EVERYTHING! – is ironic, a smirk to be replayed forever on a screen, the last thing we expect is a hippy, a proper real-life hippy, preaching oneness and love. Even yoga sorts these days mostly go on about their own “wellness”, rather than the cosmic inference of it all. Nick Mulvey’s previous albums were lightly marinaded in Baba Ram Dass and ayahuasca revelation but, with his third solo album, New Mythology, he’s gone full mystic.After creating some of the most gorgeous, original singer-songwriter music of the last decade he doesn’t let empyrean Read more ...
Tim Cumming
As break-up albums go, Heidi Talbot’s new set knocks that tightly wound ball of heartbreak, separation and release into the front rank, on an arc of often beautifully melodic self-penned songs, choice covers, and accompanists including guitarist Mark Knopfler and fiddle player, singer and the album's producer Dirk Powell.After more than a decade of marriage and musical collaboration with fiddler John McCusker, Sing it for a Lifetime finds Talbot negotiating the rapids of that union’s end. The title song opens the album with a beguiling melody carrying hard-won words that speak of their Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The gentleman in the centre of the picture above is Ivan Dorn. In Ukraine, he’s a pop star. A big pop star. His music, as he puts it on stage during the show opening Tallinn-Narva Music Week, is “pure Ukrainian house music.” Yep, there’s the bing-bong piano lines and cowbell beats of the pop end of house.Before 24 February this year an Ivan Dorn live appearance would of course be fun, an uplifting experience with a jumping-up-and-down audience doing lots of arm waving. This is confirmed in Tallinn where his enviable charisma is tempered by a charming awkwardness telegraphing he’s not fully Read more ...
joe.muggs
This album starts with an unfortunate sound. Its title track begins with the kind of drum loop that rock bands from U2 on down adopted in the early 1990s having heard Massive Attack and Happy Mondays and deciding that they were going to get on the groovy train. It’s unfortunate because as with all those Nineties bands, it remains completely beholden to a very Eighties Big Rock production style with over-egged notions of “fidelity”. Every element is neat, tidy, separated, sparkling – completely missing the point of what dance and hip hop producers were doing by hacking the possibilities of Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Not quite 50 and already Kate Rusby has notched up 30 years on the professional stage, an anniversary marked by a new album featuring newly recorded favourite songs from across her career on which “the Barnsley Nightingale” is joined by an array of special guests.Among them are compatriots Richard Hawley and KT Tunstall and, from across the Atlantic, Beth Nielsen Chapman, Sarah Jarosz and the gloriously talented Darlingside. For those buying the physical album there’s also the Royal Northern Sinfonia on a “full version” of “Secret Keeper”.The celebration opens in appropriately upbeat style Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Jono McCleery has one of those voices that once heard, demands your attention, an instrument of richness and depth, and one that has earned him many fans. The likes of Vashti Bunyan and Tom Robinson helped to crowdfund his recording debut back in 2008, Darkest Light; he steered himself through London’s eclectic electro-acoustic underground music scene alongside the likes of Jamie Woon and the Portico Quartet, and released four more folktronic-textured releases with Ninja Tune.His sixth album, on the Berlin-based Ninety Days Records, was recorded in early 2021, over five days in Rotterdam Read more ...
Tom Carr
Although the term “hipster” has become degraded to well beyond cliché, Kurt Vile is one of those artists whose fans may indeed have that in-the-know smugness. With Vile, though, this is not a bad thing. Given the increasingly confidence-shedding nature of recent world events, Vile’s mix of indie rock with psychedelia and Americana makes for a welcome escape.His first studio release since 2018’s Bottle It In, (Watch My Moves) – replete with brackets – is 15 tracks long. There’s a whole lot to dive into, beginning with “Going on a Plane Today”. With this piano-led curtain-raiser, Vile mixes in Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Expansive, free-form, handmade and improvised, the extravagantly-titled The Liquified Throne of Simplicity is the fourth album from this freewheeling Slovenian trio of multi-instrumentalists. They forage among the world’s musics as well as their own, making their own handmade instruments, and creating huge tracks redolent of a borderless musical world where the guembri rhythms of the opening 20-minute track, “Wilted Superstition Engaged in Copulation”, ring and resonate with the sound of chimes, balafon, ocorina flute, ribab and viola, the peeling Egyptian double-reeded mizmar, plus "various Read more ...