folk music
Tim Cumming
Each of them is a solo, duo or group artist of high renown, but together, something special happens. On record it’s called Laylam; on stage, Eliza Carthy, Bella Hardy, Lucy Farrell and Kate Young are the best girl group in Britain.Occasional group member Rachel Newton (The Shee, The Furrow Collective) joined them for a big Welsh sea shanty, and opened the night with spare, elegant chamber folk – fiddle, drum, Newton’s harp, voice and viola – and drawing much of her material from the album Changeling, drawing on Gaelic songs, Child Ballads, and the folktales and faerie lore of the changeling. Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
“You don’t always get what you want in life,” said Angel Olsen to a group of fans haranguing her at the front last night at the Electric Ballroom. She rarely uttered a word between songs but this was a defiant end to the evening. Though her powerful Orbison-like warbling travelled clearly across the smoky stage to the denizens a much needed intimacy was absent over the course of her fourteen-song set. A captivating presence who confidently delivers haunting vocals, she lost the connection with the audience in the final throes, who at first seemed rapt.Brazilian opener, Rodrigo Amarante Read more ...
Heidi Goldsmith
The next revolution of civil disobedience is unlikely to be a ticketed event, with a sedentary congregation of grey-haired, nostalgic former hippies. And the Royal Festival Hall (even at full capacity) is a mere campfire compared to Joan Baez's public of 30,000 protesters of Washington DC in 1967. But politics, where the drum stick is eschewed for the brush, were still the unspoken substance of her first London performance of four.“The tour before this was in Latin America,” she began in between songs while slowly changing guitars, “…and it was an honour to play in all those countries I was Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Tulegur Gangzi describes his music as “Mongolian grunge” and “nomad rock.” Thrashing at an acoustic guitar, the Inner-Mongolian troubadour is singing in the khomei style, the throat-singing which sounds part-gargle, drone and chant – or all three at once. His approach to the guitar is just as remarkable. With his left hand sliding up and down the neck, the open tunings he employs set up a sibilant plangence nodding to the trancey folk-rock of Stormcock Roy Harper. The slashing, descending guitar which kicks in near the close of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” appears to also be in Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Sam Sweeney’s Fiddle: Made In The Great War is the first solo project from one of the vibrant British folk scene’s most exciting players. Sam Sweeney made his name in Bellowhead, as a duo with Hannah James, in The Full English, in Jon Boden’s Remnant Kings, and Fay Hield’s band, and in Kerfuffle, alongside other regular and irregular groupings.It’s his fiddle that’s the real star of a thoughtful, moving and intimate account of its maker, its making, and its afterlife. Made but not assembled by one Richard Howard in 1915, a young working-class man from Leeds who made his own instruments and Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
When you listen to J Mascis’ solo work – 2011’s Several Shades of Why in particular, and now this follow-up – it’s hard to imagine him doing anything else. Which is ridiculous, of course: as frontman of still-active slacker-rockers Dinosaur Jr. Mascis has been an influential figure in alternative rock circles for years. But I challenge you to listen to the way his warm, creaky voice meanders its way through the songs on Tied to a Star, like the sound of somebody talking to himself as he fumbles his way through a musical diary entry, and tell me that it is not a perfect fit.Which is not to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Troubadours - Folk and the Roots of American Music Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4This is one of the most important reissues of the year. As the year ends, it may become the most important. Troubadours - Folk and the Roots of American Music is a set of four, individual three-CD sets charting the evolution of the American folk-based singer-songwriter style from its roots and influences to when it became a default mode of expression in the mid-Sixties and later.All-encompassing are words underselling Troubadours. Everything which should be, and everyone who needs to be, is here Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The danger of working successfully in many genres is that fans come to expect something revolutionary with each release. A secondary threat is that you succumb to generic schizophrenia, and thus are never quite sure which voice to speak with. Fin Greenall, founder/leader of the folk-blues trio Fink, has a touch of both of these in this latest release, in which songs of menacing Americana sit somewhat uneasily alongside pieces of lugubrious personal reflection. He may be feted for his eclecticism; he’s more likely to suffer for failing to please all his fans. The title track and “Pilgrim Read more ...
Tim Cumming
There are two Richard Thompsons – the deft acoustic magician and the electric guitarist shaking the rafters and the bones of the most committed air-guitar headbangers. He's unique in that no other guitarist could kick out the jams on the electric and seduce and beguile with the acoustic the way Thompson does.While his records are band affairs, his stage work encompasses band and solo acoustic tours. I recall seeing him in a small club in Paris, in the early 2000s, playing one of the best acoustic sets I’ve ever heard, and though it’s more than 30 years old now, one of my favourite Thompson Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Ostensibly folk, Emma Tricca’s second album Relic sounds more like a devotional song cycle heard in a church than on a club or festival stage. The massed chorale of Tricca’s voice which opens “Sunday Reverie”, the spectral organ of “Golden Chimes” and the lyrics of “Take me Away”, which yearn of being transported to somewhere she has never been where the trees are aging, all invoke the search for the spiritual.Initially pegged as a Greenwich Village-fascinated folkie inspired by encounters with John Renbourn and Bob Dylan's early champion Odetta, Tricca's voice is as singular and as Read more ...
peter.quinn
Impressively old sea shanties with stacked up vocal harmonies and sing-along choruses. Check. Captivating explorations of desire, drink and death. Check. Luxuriant, high spec arrangements presenting an ear-catching crazy quilt of influences. Check. Newly signed to Island Records, in this fifth studio album the award-winning 11-piece folk band sprinkle their usual magic over a bracingly fresh and brilliantly constructed collection of songs.While some albums drift benignly into your consciousness, others begin with a figurative grabbing of your lapel. Revival falls very much into the latter Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Something about First Aid Kit has always seemed a little too polished, too perfect. While there can be no denying that their 2012 breakthrough record The Lion’s Roar is a rich, lovely listen – in no small part thanks to the charm of Klara and Johanna Söderberg’s effortless harmonies – its strict adherence to the trail blazed by its transatlantic influences kept me from finding it as magical as the rest of the world seemed to. If the question is how do two sisters from Stockholm follow something as technically perfect as that album on their major label debut, its first single “My Silver Lining Read more ...