folk music
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 ...
Tim Cumming
They've performed together on stage and in the studio since the first Waterson:Carthy albums of the early 1990s, but this is the first time Martin and Eliza Carthy have recorded as a duo, and they've kept it lean and clear with just their voices, Eliza's fiddle and Martin's guitar – each element distinct enough by itself, but together creating a very pure, personal kind of austere beauty. There's no excess baggage, and the tunes are handled with the kind of expertise, love and assured interpretation that comes with a lifetime's immersion.The opening “Her Servant Man” is a succinct Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Denmark’s Broken Twin take the lead in the latest of theartsdesk’s regular round-ups of the new music coming in from Scandinavia. Debut album May is melancholy. Minimally arranged, with lyrics addressing the pain brought by the passing of time, bleakness in the form of metaphorical references to weather and what happens after death, this is an affecting album. The sense of a lonely despair is reinforced by the defeated, distant voice of Majke Voss Romme – who is Broken Twin. May might fit clichés about Nordic chill, but the album draws from and sits proudly alongside landmark works of the Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Nobody ever accused, say, Dylan of having a voice that didn't mature with his songwriting. It’s something that springs to mind every time I try to put my finger on exactly why I’ve never warmed to the country-folk sounds of Conor Oberst’s latter work. Stylistically, the music is beautiful and while the lyrics may not be steeped in the same visceral poetry of Oberst’s Bright Eyes days they’re still a cut above most contemporary songwriting. But the quivering timbre of the voice that gave that band its visceral, emotional core or that wrung itself raw fronting early 00s emo act Desaparecidos is Read more ...
peter.quinn
Materializing out of London's thriving traditional Irish music scene, this debut recording from new five-piece CrossHarbour presents an 11-track collection whose appeal should go way beyond traditional Irish music initiates. Featuring a judicious mix of tunes and songs, the quintet's musicianship is fabulously impressive.In flute player Órlaith McAuliffe the band has a once-in-a-generation talent, a brilliant, preposterously accomplished musician who has bagged so many All-Ireland titles that her mantelpiece must be groaning under the weight. The band's other melody player, fiddler Sam Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
At last night’s Eurovision Song Contest, host country Denmark submitted “Cliché Love Song”, a weedy Bruno Mars-a-like designed to ensure they did not win for a second year running. It came ninth. While understandable that Danish national broadcaster DR would try to duck the expense of staging the extravaganza in Copenhagen again in 2015, they could have displayed some imagination by choosing an entrant that was certainly not a winner but had some worth. Instead of Basim wth his paper-thin “Cliché Love Song”, Aalborg’s Get Your Gun would have made a grand choice to showcase Denmark in fine Read more ...
Jasper Rees
From the balcony overlooking the mosh pit you get a good idea of how long a band has been going. Last night at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, The Men They Couldn’t Hang celebrated their 30th anniversary while a small kinetic cluster of mainly bald 50-year-olds pinged into one another like shiny billiard balls. A fiver says a sheepish accountant or two will have had some explaining to do this morning in A&E.The Men could and should have been contenders. For the second half of the Eighties, they were. Forged in the crucible of Thatcherism, they quickly established themselves as England’s Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“You’re great listeners. You have surrendered your ears.” The reverent hush that descended for two hours on the Festival Hall is a new sort of sound at a Christy Moore concert. There was a time when such a gathering would bristle with fervour. Twenty years ago, if not of Irish descent, you could feel distinctly like the odd one out. Things have changed, for any number of factors: the peace dividend in Ulster, the ever-diluting Celtic DNA of the Irish diaspora, while the senior sections of Moore’s audience – and pensioners abounded last night – have grown older and less raucous with him.But Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The ease with which Wallis Bird can flit between genres armed with nothing but a guitar and her warm, raggedly bluesy voice has been apparent since at the very least her 2012 self-titled third album. Even still, those of us who fell for that album’s considerable charms could hardly have expected its architect to celebrate a move to Berlin by going full-on Eurodisco.It’s an acquired taste, the throbbingly incessant disco beat that punctuates “Hardly Hardly”, the opening track - and first single - from Architect from about four bars in, but the multiple Irish Meteor winner Bird has never been Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Art, real art, is a denial of the status quo. A tradition that values the role of the individual.” Speaking in Estonia’s capital for the opening of Tallinn Music Week, the Baltic country’s President Toomas Hendrik Ilves is referring to what’s just over his shoulder. Freedom is on his mind.Estonia shares a border with Russia, and Tallinn is just 1000km from Ukraine’s capital Kiev. Taken together, Estonia, Latvia and Belarus share an unbroken border with their former Soviet master. On the Black Sea, Ukraine is on the southern seaboard of that border, and on the Baltic, Estonia is on the Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's hard to countenance sometimes that there was an era where Marc Almond could have been a bona fide, chart-smashing pop star. His ability to parlay the archest of high camp and the most grotesque of low life into something digestible by genuine mass culture was, from the very beginning, quite uncanny.There was always a sulphurous whiff of something downright Luciferian about him, yet enough fragility to make the act seem all too real – an infinitely more convincing and intriguing character than more recent more self-conscious attempts at “transgressive” pop like the gallumphing vaudeville Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
With that warm, slightly husky voice of hers - not unlike that of an old friend at the other end of the telephone - Suzanne Vega has always been one of those singers I’d happily listen to reading the Yellow Pages. To be honest, there are parts of the often mystical, always curious Tales From the Queen of Pentacles that would probably have been easier to understand if she had done, even if the names in Vega’s directory turned out to be as ill-fitting as Mother Teresa, the Knight of Wands and Macklemore.It’s an interesting one to unwrap, this first collection of new material in seven years, Read more ...