folk music
Thomas H. Green
Record Store Day is tomorrow! At theartsdesk on Vinyl we’ve been sent a selection of exclusive RSD goodies. Check out the reviews, then check out your local record shop! See you amongst it.THEARTSDESK ON VINYL’S CHOICE CUT OF RECORD STORE DAY APRIL 2024The Near Jazz Experience featuring Mike Garson Character Actor EP (Sartorial)It’s been a while since we heard from this unit. The NJE, as they're mostly known, consist of sax’n’brass player Terry Edwards, who’s played on a billion tunes you love (from PJ Harvey to Hot Chip to Tom Waits), Mark Bedford, who’s Bedders from Madness, and Simon Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHLondon Afrobeat Collective Esengo (Canopy)The weather has not been kind to the UK lately, pelting it daily with endless drizzle and gloom. So wrap your ears around this, a mini-album that will infuse any room with blazing sunshine as soon as the needle hits the plastic. Esengo was supposed to be reviewed last month but one listen and, instead of being held back for review, as it should have been, it bullet-shot straight into the record box for DJing (where it more than proved its worth). The band are a loose-limbed outfit, nine-strong and consisting of members from England, Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The British folk artist and singer songwriter Olivia Chaney released her third solo album this week, as we break out into springtime, and she’ll be touring sporadically around the UK over the next few months, with a showcase at London’s Union Chapel in June.Chaney is a singular singer and songwriter with a beautiful voice and the instrumental finesse honed at the Royal Academy of Music and Aldeburgh. She released her first EP in 2010 and 2013, the year she was nominated twice, for the Horizon Award and Best Original Song, at the BBC Folk Awards (and again for Folk Singer of the Year in 2019). Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It was one of those truly memorable evenings – a Royal Albert Hall concert by a someone with a long career (and record sales of 14 million), a woman I’d been introduced to only a few months earlier when a music-loving friend gifted me a CD. Interestingly, she’d been put on to it by a friend in Europe.So it’s a treat in this cacophonous, unsettling age to have a new album from Loreena McKennitt, a singer-songwriter with her own record label whose numerous honours include two Junos, Canada’s premiere music award, two Grammy nominations, and the Royal Canadian Geographical Society Joseph-Elzéar Read more ...
Bill Bailey: Thoughtifier, Brighton Centre review - offbeat adventures with a whirling, erudite mind
Thomas H. Green
I first saw Bill Bailey at least 30 years ago in the cabaret tent at Glastonbury Festival, the audience lying on hessian matting, a fug of hash smoke in the air. He seemed one of us, a bug-eyed, Tolkien-prog hippy with a stoned sense of humour and charged musical chops. A lot of water under the bridge since then. Animal rights champion. Won Strictly Come Dancing. Mellow middle-of-the road chat-show regular. Cuddly national treasure status approaching. Even recently told The Guardian he’d forgiven Bryan Adams his multiple musical atrocities. No way, dude. No way. And yet, and yet… at 59-years- Read more ...
Katie Colombus
There are few ways of describing the music of The Dead South – progressive bluegrass is my favourite because it's so meaningless to so many. By which I mean it doesn't matter what the genre, it's just good music, and that's all you need to know.I have such beautiful memories of "In Hell I'll Be Good Company" coming to our attention via Youtube during Lockdown (not sure why as it was released in 2014) – an incredibly catchy track that told the strange tale of an abusive husband killed by his wife. It became a family anthem for 2023 that we all (age range 4-44) perfected our bounce'n' heel Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Having carried herself to the front rank of young British singer-songwriters with her debut album, 2021’s The Eternal Rocks Beneath, Birmingham-born Katherine Priddy carries her muse from the eternal and mythological poetry of that album for a more centered, experiential sense of time as captured in the back and forth rhythms of The Pendulum Swing.Sealed at the opening and end by two short, limpid instrumental pieces (“Returning” and “Leaving”), the songs within range from evocations of family – the likes of “Walnut Shell”, about her twin brother, and the self-explanatory “Father of Two” Read more ...
India Lewis
The Dome, as the opening act, Clara Mann noted, is a normally a heavy metal venue (black or dark purple tour bus parked outside, a long queue of piercings and mohawks). It was a lovely confounding of expectations, therefore, to stage Mann’s own plaintive “sad sad” guitar songs (her description) and John Francis Flynn’s inventive and reinterpreted trad folk here. Mann’s voice is beautifully clear, with just the right amount of ornamentation to simplicity, her accompaniment on guitar undercutting her songs without overwhelming their sparse, quietude. A highlight was a song she introduced Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Critically acclaimed in the US, singer-songwriter Sarah Jarosz has won four Grammies during the course of her career. Born in Texas, spending most of her adult life in New York, her seventh album was created in her new hometown of Nashville, with an all-star cast of country-flavoured session musicians and producer Daniel Tashian.She moved to Nashville to be with her future husband, and some of the songs reflect this, but musically Jarosz holds the line with what came before, highly polished, reflective folk-Americana.It’s a matter of taste as to whether listeners find her style of production Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Nailah Hunter’s debut album occupies a domain where trip-hop, Lana Del Rey were she recording in a deep, echo-filled cave and ambient-slanted pop overlap. There’s a kinship with FKA Twigs and Julia Holter, but Hunter’s propensity to channel what feels like a mystical experience means that Lovegaze is more inscrutable than what’s generated by first impressions.Her voice is distant, a low-ish soprano set in a wash of synths. Pattering percussion and the glissando of her Celtic harp pierce the aural mist. On the relatively sparsely arranged “Adorned” – which has a slight Alice Coltrane feel – Read more ...
peter.quinn
A flawless song list comprising Richard Rodney Bennett originals plus some of his favourite standards, stunning arrangements by conductor Scott Dunn, plus the mellifluous vocals of Claire Martin magically aligned in my Album of the Year, I Watch You Sleep, an extraordinarily beautiful tribute to Bennett marking the tenth anniversary of his death.It was one of several outstanding vocal jazz releases this year. Returning Weather, a new song cycle from the Dublin-born vocalist and composer, Christine Tobin, presented a fascinating exploration of cultural reconnection. The album’s striking sound- Read more ...
mark.kidel
PJ Harvey never fails to deliver – much as I hate that over-used word, the go-to assurance from politicians who promise the earth and dump nothing but shit. With Polly Harvey, she reaches into the unknown, true to her creative impulses, and oblivious to fashion.And yet, an album like I Inside the OId Year Dying is without question a manifestation of the malaise which seems to have plunged humanity into almost impenetrable fog. No escapism here: this isn't a party record. In a career that has gone from blues-inflected exploration of wounds and desires to something more political, she seems to Read more ...