folk music
Liz Thomson
Twinned with the legendary Newport Folk Festival, founded on Rhode Island in 1959 as a counterpart to the celebrated jazz festival, the Cambridge Folk Festival this year celebrated its 54th birthday under blue skies. The sun shone relentlessly throughout its four days, which meant that performers squinted out at a sea of semi-clad and often tattooed bodies, many sheltering under beaded parasols. Keeping everything in tune with the high levels of humidity can’t have been easy though most everyone managed it – even though, as Janis Ian joked, tuning has sometimes been antithetical to folkies. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
A sight every music fan should see and hear once is The Proclaimers playing Scotland. Around 18 years ago I saw them play a giant marquee at the T In The Park Festival. It was like a rally, a roaring wall of joyful fanaticism (on which note, their autumn 2018 tour there sold out 30,000 tickets in 20 minutes!). If it was a rally, though, it was a righteous, tending-to-socialism one for The Proclaimers have a strand of activism in their blood. On their latest album, this is writ large.The title track sets the stage at the start, a two-and-a-half minute classic, one of their best, with punk Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It might have begun with The Beatles espousal of Bob Dylan in 1964. There was also The Animals whose first two singles, issued the same year, repurposed tracks from Bob Dylan’s 1962 debut album. Before The Byrds hit big with their version of his “Mr. Tambourine Man” in summer 1965, Britain’s pop groups were already hip to Dylan and incorporating elements of his approach into their sound.Some acolytes like Donovan, who emerged in early 1965, even attempted to clone the Dylan look. Other were more subtle. The Searchers’ late 1964 single “What Have They Done to the Rain?” was an adaptation of a Read more ...
David Nice
"They incessantly break down, destroy and fragment the mistrust that exists among people," wrote a Latvian journalist of a folklore group during the start of the Baltic countries' "singing revolution" against Soviet rule in 1988. This is the recent reality, a nonviolent uprising unique in history, behind the daunting facts and figures of Latvia's latest "Song and Dance Celebration". In 65 events over a week in Riga, having rehearsed for five years, 16,500 singers from 427 choirs and 18,174 dancers from 739 groups - including those in the post-war Latvian diaspora around the world - perform to Read more ...
Ellie Porter
This woozy, seductive slice of gothic Americana is the Canadian quartet’s first album in six years, a swampy follow-up to the icy, winter-inspired sounds of their last offering, The Wilderness. “All That Reckoning Part 1” gets things going, an oppressive tale of a relationship with dark undercurrents. “This bed was poison / And I lay afraid of ever touching you,” breathes Margo Timmins, whose rich, smoky vocals go from seductive and sinister to sweet and romantic over the course of the record. Unfortunately, a few of these songs – including the next track, “When We Arrive” –seem to Read more ...
Owen Richards
Lamp Lit Prose is the ninth Dirty Projectors album since 2003, an incredibly prolific output for any artist. All the more impressive when you consider it’s the project of producer/songwriter David Longstreth, who also finds time to collaborate with artists such as Rihanna, Kanye, Paul McCartney and Solange. Such a notable CV befits an act as innovative as Dirty Projectors, and their latest release further demonstrates the talent on show.“Change is the only constant law” sings Longstreth, an appropriate lyric as Lamp Lit Prose is a journey of shifting influences. Tracks range from folk and Read more ...
Liz Thomson
There aren’t too many folk singers that make it into the pages of Vogue and Interview magazines, but that’s what comes of being a face of Burberry – attire that’s not necessarily a good folk fit. He’s also been snapped in the Augustus Hare catalogue modelling a rather sharp suit and tie. He’s studied theology, likes Bob Dylan and Nick Drake, and his favourite city is Jerusalem. He describes himself as “a classical folk singer”. Sometimes he sounds a little like Donovan.Quiet Man is the third outing by the Dorset-born singer-songwriter Roo Panes and it is, he says, about “contentment” and has Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Rose Garden didn’t linger in the bright lights but for those inclined towards harmony pop their name resonates due to the quality of their sole album rather than memories of them as a one-hit-wonder. Granted, their debut single and late 1967 US hit “Next Plane To London” was a wonderful example of moody Mamas & the Papas-style pop which will always be a staple of American oldies radio. But there was no follow-up hit and it’s April 1968’s long-player The Rose Garden which seals their reputation.Interest in the album began picking up in the early Eighties after the realisation it Read more ...
Jo Southerd
Sophomore records are never easy, especially when your debut was as acclaimed and beloved as french artist Melody Prochet’s first outing as Melody’s Echo Chamber, and this follow-up has had its fair share of bumps in the road. Prochet first announced Bon Voyage in April last year, on her 30th birthday; a new song was released, and a string of tour dates to go with it. But shortly after, Prochet was hospitalised following a serious accident that left her with broken vertebrae in her neck and spine, and a brain aneurysm. The album and accompanying live shows were put on hold. It’s impossible to Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Mark Hodkinson is a Rochdale writer, journalist, songwriter and musician who’s also behind underground label/publishing house Pomona. Black Sedan is the latest product of his febrile mind, a band collective that’s been slowly coming together over the last couple of years. Their debut album sprawls about a number of styles but retains a likeable cohesiveness, wallowing in a loose, strummed stew that’s lightly psychedelic with plenty of sonic trimmings.It begins with “Love on Love”, a delicious, widescreen piece based around Charlie Chaplin’s fantastic speech at the end of The Great Dictator, Read more ...
Ellie Porter
Ignore the associations that come with the name LUMP - this record is as far from leaden, dull and heavy as you can get. A dreamy, itchy collaboration between folk musicians Laura Marling and Mike Lindsay of Tunng, LUMP features vocals and lyrics by Marling and music, sound effects and "textures" by Lindsay. A furry man-creature – who looks a bit like the costumed prankster dad in the German film Toni Erdmann – sits mournfully on the cover, and is also the star of the oddly touching animated video accompanying fourth track "Curse of the Contemporary". The video sees Read more ...
joe.muggs
Ryuichi Sakamoto has conquered underground and mainstream with seeming ease over four decades, never dropping off in the quality of his releases. Indeed his most recent projects, following his return to public life after treatment for throat cancer in 2014-15, are among his best. The async album was rightly listed by many, including theartsdesk, as one of 2017's best; the async remodels remixes showed him absolutely keyed in to the electronica zeitgeist, and Glass, his live collaboration album with Carsten Nicolai aka Alva Noto is a worthy addition to the duo's extensive Read more ...