folk music
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHRattle Encircle (Upset! The Rhythm)Rattle are an unusual band. Consisting of Nottingham duo Katharine Eira Brown and Theresa Wrigley, their set-up is two drum kits, with which they build simple hypnotic patterns then add repetitive vocals over the top. They don’t sound like anyone else. Well, perhaps a little like the more outré work of femme-centric post-punk bands such as The Raincoats, The Slits, The Au Pairs, and ESG. It’s not music that most will put on to chill out to or bounce around to – it’s too spooked and odd for either – but it also has a weird power, almost like Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Langenu are a black metal band. On stage at Estonia’s Tallinn Music Week, they are fearsome. Blood-vessel-burstingly intense. Tempering their force with twists into progressive, psychedelic-adjacent territory, they are a band any rock fan would dig.Playing an evening dedicated to the region’s Finno-Ugric culture, Langenu stand apart. Folk or traditional music is typical to this realm. Rock, in any form, is not. This is a first. They are here because their last release, the Setooniq EP, is sung entirely in the Seto language.Seto, like Estonian, Finnish and Sámi, is a Finno-Ugric language. The Read more ...
Ibi Keita
Black Country, New Road’s Forever Howlong is an ambitious reinvention that both captivates and, at times, frustrates. Following Isaac Wood’s departure, the band leans into a more collaborative and folk-inspired direction, trading their post-punk chaos for something more delicate and introspective. It’s a bold move, and one that yields some truly beautiful moments, even if the overall experience doesn’t fully resonate.Tracks like “Two Horses” and “The Boy” stand out for their emotional clarity and nuanced storytelling. The former, in particular, showcases the band’s ability to create intimacy Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Mike Scott is The Waterboys. Launched by wide-eyed 1980s folk-rock, and “The Whole of the Moon”, he’s long since roamed into whatever stylistic gumbo he fancies. The latest album – the band’s 16th – is a concept piece, a 25-track sonic biography of the late Hollywood maverick Dennis Hopper.It’s sometimes entertaining, sometimes preposterous, and sometimes pure cringe. The songs follow the chronology of Hopper’s life. For instance, there’s a floaty Floyd-ish song early on called “Blues for Terry Southern”, in honour of Easy Rider’s co-writer, while near the end is “Golf, They Say”, a southern Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A pizzicato violin opens Song Over Støv. Gradually, other instruments arrive: bowed violin, a fluttering flute, pattering percussion, an ominous double bass. They merge. The climax is furious, intensely rhythmic. Suddenly, it is over.“Straumen frobi” – which translates from Norwegian as The Current Passing By – sets the scene for five more equally dynamic, just-as feverish tracks. Each is as much about the structured interplay of instruments as it is impact. At times – especially during “I natt” (Tonight) and “Trø” (Step) – proceedings evoke the folk music/rock hybrid characterised by Sweden’ Read more ...
joe.muggs
America – the pro-wrestling-ass nation, the ultimate society of the spectacle – famously likes things big, and modern country and western music has gone along with that. Big hats, big trucks, big sentiment, big pop production, very big sales indeed, and not a lot in the way of subtlety. But country also has a parallel history, of course: as music of the little guy, the theatre of the domestic, a place for preservation of simple folk traditions in the face of the overwhelming scale of modernity. And it’s into this that through this century the Alabaman singer-songwriter Jason Isbell, whether Read more ...
David Gray
Occasionally, when I pass my own reflection, out of the corner of my eye I catch a glimpse of the likeness of my father, shining out through the bones in my face. In this way his ghost walks with me. Sometimes the making process can feel like that, a matter of training our peripheral vision to retrieve the images and ideas that are flickering at the edge of our field of view, existing in the same dimly lit space as dreams, primal impulses and hazy memories. It’s obvious that a lot of songs are written in response to events, either in our own lives or in the lives of those around us Read more ...
Liz Thomson
I come to this album from a week or so spent among the denizens of the New York and Boston folk revivals, including a key figure from Tulsa and the Guthrie Center, and a concert (Judy Collins, marking 85 years of music and activism).They were a reminder (if one were needed) of how much the music of Woody Guthrie, his children and grandchildren, still means in a country heading back at full throttle to one that Woody and his confrères would recognise all too easily: one of poverty and prejudice and life-altering climate change. But this time around there is no FDR, no New Deal, and right now Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Canadian singer Basia Bulat has tried on various musical hats during her career but is most associated with singer-songwriterly folk-pop. Her last album was the melancholic, string-swathed The Garden but with Basia’s Palace, her seventh album, she seems in a jollier frame of mind. She has veered into overtly electronic pop before, especially on her 2016 album Good Advice, but this time it’s a bubblier, warmer version. Then again, these nine songs still find room for heartache.Bulat’s voice and style remind of Emmy the Great. This isn’t to hint at plagiarism – both singers started releasing Read more ...
Tim Cumming
On the first date of a 17-concert tour that had its preview at Celtic Connections in January, Across the Evening Sky begins with the liminal, predatory dangers of associating in any way with the sly “Reynardine”, with Matt Robinson on piano and electronic keyboards and Alec Bowman-Clarke’s bass evoking the twilit murk of the magical faerie song, recorded by Sandy on Fairport’s Liege & Lief.From that opening performance, Clarke had the room, the charm was cast, her own distinctive voice and stylings merging with Sandy’s originals – filling the vessel but in doing so assuming her own shape Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
It was the sonically adventurous, shiveringly atmospheric cello piece by Latvian composer Preteris Vasks that proved to be the first showstopper of this enjoyably esoteric evening. Dutch cellist Hadewych van Gent began the pianissimo movement of Vasks’ Gramata Cellam by creating a build-up of whistling harmonic effects on the A string, followed by a yearning feather-light improvisation in the cello’s upper registers that suddenly plunged vertiginously bass-wards.The rich, velvety chordal sequence that ensued was accompanied by Gent’s wordless soprano, as clear and piercing as a shaft of light Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The quandary is this. Middlesbrough singer Amelia Coburn made one of my favourite albums of last year, her debut, Between the Moon and the Milkman, and I hear she’s playing live near me on the south coast, not something that happens every day.Then I learn the gig is supporting Jim Moray (pictured below left), a much more established folk singer, originally from Staffordshire. So, I check out his music. It’s not my bag. But, sometimes, in concert these things persuade…The short of it is that, live, Moray is still not for me. An accomplished producer outside his own work (Art Brut, Blair Dunlop Read more ...