folk music
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 ...
mark.kidel
Ray LaMontagne is a versatile artist who for years has been navigating the territory between hard rock and contemporary folk. His voice can be soft and gentle and yet also filled on occasion with something close to aggression. He has a firm grasp of what makes a song unfold with a sense of inevitability that is pleasing to hear rather than just predictable.Born in 1973, he often resurrects classic rock sounds that are clearly the result of absorbing many treasures of the American and British back catalogues. There are echoes of Fred Neil’s sensitive tenor on the opener “To the Sea” and the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Record Store Day 2018 – Saturday April 21 – is upon us. It should really be Record Shop Day 2018 as this is the UK but let’s not quibble. Instead, put aside cynicism about major labels cashing in, wander down to the nearest record shop – and, happily, new record shops are starting to pop up a lot lately – then rifle through the racks. Below are the releases that reached theartsdesk on Vinyl, quite a few of them rare as hens’ teeth. Dig in, see what takes your fancy, then go out and find them, out there on the high streets and back streets...theartsdesk on Vinyl's FAVOURITE RELEASE FOR RECORD Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There’s a crisis in popular musical vocals. They’ve reached a very naff stasis. After a decade-and-a-half of Cowell hegemony and stars that have risen during the same period, a generation thinks there are only two ways to express emotion. One is melismatic singing (for women – wandering wildly about the higher registers on every syllable, a la Mariah Carey/Whitney Houston), the other is voice-breaking (for men - cracking into a vulnerable falsetto a la Jeff Buckley/Coldplay). It’s all very boring. There are so, so many other ways to express emotion. Just ask Louis Armstrong, Ian Dury, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Jeremy Cunningham (b.1965) is bass player and a founding member of The Levellers, as well as being a visual artist in his own right. During the 1990s The Levellers, and most especially their 1991 album Levelling the Land, became a phenomenon. The group were punk-influenced folk-rockers whose songs were often polemic and political. It was no coincidence that their main flush of popularity was during the premiership of John Major. They became a focus for anti-government feeling, especially among those affiliated with the travelling and festival communities (remember Major’s “New age travellers Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Can you find a more extensive and comprehensive rundown of monthly vinyl releases than theartsdesk on Vinyl? We can’t. But then we would say that. Don’t believe us, though; below we surf punk, techno, film soundtracks, folk, major label boxset retrospectives, avant-garde electronica, pop, R&B and tons more. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHBelako Render Me Numb, Trivial Violence (Belako)Basque four-piece Belako create the most exciting new version of indie rock that theartsdesk on Vinyl has heard in a long while. In fact, it’s belittling to term it "indie" for this is a galloping hybrid that Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Fenne Lily is a young Bristolian singer-songwriter whose voice will take her far. Her debut album is decent enough, and there are songs on it that reach out and grab you by the guts, but it’s her extraordinary, fragile voice that stays in the mind. Lily’s oeuvre is folk-acoustica but run through with electronics and reverb, putting her in a haunted place where she sounds as if she belongs in one of Twin Peaks' more peculiar scenes.The obvious comparison for much of this album is Lana del Rey, although Lily's voice is higher pitched. There’s something about the way she rides chords and rhythms Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“When I was singing at my best, I was the essence of English song. And that was all I ever really wanted.” It’s said without pride and in a matter-of-fact manner. The speaker is Shirley Collins in the documentary The Ballad of Shirley Collins. Issued on DVD in a package with a CD collecting music which defines parts of her world, the film tracks a person balancing certainty about who she is and was with an enviable level-headedness.The Ballad of Shirley Collins is also issued as an album – a quasi-soundtrack of the film. But the version to get is the book-bound CD/DVD configuration Read more ...
peter.quinn
An album that enchants and surprises in equal measure, Heritage sees US sax player and composer Owen Broder explore the full gamut of American roots music – from blues and Appalachian folk to bluegrass and spirituals – through the prism of modern jazz.Subtitled ‘The American Roots Project’, Broder’s welcoming inclusiveness is evident from the outset, with his self-penned “Goin’ Up Home” transmogrifying from a simple folk chorale into driving swing and, neatly bookending the album, the collective improv of “A Wiser Man Than Me” which channels the singular sound-world of New Orleans.A Read more ...