folk music
Katie Colombus
It’s a rare thing that musicians sound better live than they do on Spotify. But Florence Welch sings a note perfect set – even when jumping up and down like a pogo stick, whirling and spinning, or sprinting along the front of the stage to meet fans.Shining with androgynous, enigmatic beauty, she opens with the dramatic “June”, the line “hold on to each other” sung with gravitas as she stands on a tree-cloaked stage beneath the open sky. It’s a message that resonates from the onset – you can feel it, the connection with her hometown audience – the same way Flo seems to be feeling the crowd Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although British folk-jazz stylists Pentangle played their first official concert in May 1967, their name is borrowed for the title of Unpentangled, a box set of their guitarist John Renbourn’s work on album which kicks off two years earlier. It’s not the disconnect it might seem from the billing as the set includes his 1966 collaborative album Bert and John, made with Pentangle's other guitarist Bert Jansch. The band’s singer Jacqui McShee is heard on Renbourn’s Another Monday album, issued later that year. Their bassist Danny Thompson appears on early 1967’s Watch the Stars, which Dorris Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Earlier this year, eight musicians – Karine Polwart, Julie Fowlis, Seckou Keita, Kris Drever, Kerry Andrew, Rachel Newton, Beth Porter and Jim Molyneux – set about working with the ‘spell songs’ of nature writer Robert Macfarlane and the images from nature of artist Jackie Morris, and recorded what they created at Rockfield studios, then performed four sell-out shows to standing ovations in February. At these shows, Morris would create new images live on stage as the musicians played. Next weekend, they return to Folk By The Oak, the one-day festival in Hertfordshire, and the patron of the Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Who would have thought that Ari Aster could top the satanic delights of Hereditary? Yet with Midsommar, a psychedelic twist on folk horror, he has. Aster abandons the supernatural to show that it’s not things that go bump in the night that scare us, it’s other people.Think of your worst romantic relationship, the one that churned you up inside and left you a sobbing mess for months. This is the territory that Aster mines in his latest work. Florence Pugh plays Dani, a post-grad student whose life is split between worrying about her suicidal, bipolar sister, and her relationship with Christian Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Endlessly gigging Northern Irish performer Foy Vance's profile first rocketed after touring with fellow singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran. The pair became pals, Vance went onto support the likes of Elton John, and signed to Sheeran’s Gingerbread Man Records. His fourth album is the first of a themed couple paying tribute to the southern US roots of popular music (the other will hail from Sam Phillips Studios in Memphis). How enjoyable it is depends largely on how the listener feels about what music writer Simon Reynolds terms “retro-mania”.Muscle Shoals Studios in Alabama (and before that FAME Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
The Barbican Hall hardly boasts the numinous acoustic of Gloucester Cathedral for which Vaughan Williams composed his Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, but Sir Simon Rattle has long known how to build space into the architecture of what he conducts.No indulgences needed to be made for the students of the Guildhall School of Music next door. They slotted seamlessly within the ranks of the LSO to conjure a luminous halo of string sound, untroubled by the sense of loss which belongs to the piece in more lean and urgent performances. Their wind colleagues then filled the stage for Percy Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
With her timeless vocals and jazz-inflected folk melodies, it feels like a bit of Los Angeles songwriter Bedouine lives in the golden age of Hollywood. It’s a dichotomy she goes as far as to address on “Echo Park”, a woozy Sunday morning wander through one of the city’s more bohemian neighbourhoods whose melody - and observationally poetic lyrics - draw from the Joni Mitchell playbook. “I’ll stay as long as I don’t tire from the rising cost of coffee,” she confesses. “The skyline’s inching higher, but the sights are free.”Born in Aleppo, Syria, Azniv Korkejian has been a US resident since her Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Tomorrow, Martin Scorsese delivers, via Netflix, two hours and 22 minutes of screen time devoted to Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, following on from the release last week of the latest Bootleg Series boxed set, 14 CDs covering five full concerts from November and December 1975, as well as rehearsals and sundry soundboard cuts from other shows. Casual fans may be content with the excellent 2 CD Rolling Thunder set issued back in the Noughties; collectors, however, will be clearing shelf room to set it alongside the rest of an increasingly cyclopean Bootleg Series. The rehearsals, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Only those who’ve just popped in from an early 20th century Tennessee cotton field will have recently observed more pairs of dungarees in one place than at Red Rooster. It’s a festival that prides itself on a rich diet of Americana alongside a defiantly retro aesthetic. Red Rooster offers up expertly curated, off-the-beaten-track sounds, but there’s a strong sense that it’s as much about hanging out, about having all day/all evening picnics soaked in bourbon cocktails while somewhere not too far away a banjo is twanged by a stetson-wearing someone you’ve never heard of.The festival runs from Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Outside the Palladium a couple of months back for Joan Baez’s farewell, I was given a flyer for this album – by Naomi Bedford herself it turns out. We had a brief chat which left me with a good feeling about the project and I was disappointed to see I’d be away for the London concert marking the launch of Singing It All Back Home: Appalachian Ballads of English and Scottish Origin. My intuition was correct for this, the third outing from Bedford and Simmonds and a talented group of confrères, among them Ben Walker on banjo, Rhys Lovell on bass and Ben Paley (son of the Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Was it imagination or did The Waterboys’ audience at London’s Roundhouse, invited to sing along to “The Nearest Thing to Hip”, really sing extra-loud and lustily on the line “in this shithole”? On a momentous day that seemed to push Britain further toward the perilous unknown, Mike Scott’s energetic performance of the song from the band’s 2015 album Modern Blues certainly struck a chord, and his recollections of youthful visits to London and lament of now long-gone delights surely resonated with many.There was the record store in Westbourne Grove where the teenaged Scott was invariably told Read more ...
Owen Richards
Better Oblivion Community Center may be a supergroup of sorts, but the name still draws less recognition that its members (Phoebe Bridgers and Conor Oberst from Bright Eyes). Maybe it’s just too complicated to remember, because a packed Shepherd’s Bush Empire proved the band’s wide appeal – lairy lads and muso pensioners, side-by-side for a night of charm and angst.Oberst and Bridgers have very different voices, but her effortless tones melt through his fragile strains to form a sort of alchemy together. It worked surprisingly well on record, and perhaps more so live. There’s an honesty and Read more ...