folk music
Tim Cumming
The Full English album and live tour is the stage and studio result of an ambitious project from the EFDSS (English Folk Dance and Song Society), drawing together songs from the early 20th-century collections of songhunters including Lucy Broadwood, Percy Grainger, Frank Kidson, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Cecil Sharp.The Full English is also a web portal, describing itself as the most comprehensive searchable database of English folk songs, tunes, dances and customs in the world. For fans of traditional songs, the newly-launched Song Collectors Collective site features living source singers Read more ...
peter.quinn
It's only the truly great albums that usher you into a sound-world that is entirely sui generis. And so it is with this second chapter of jazz sax player and composer Matana Roberts's Coin Coin project, a vast musical work-in-progress exploring themes of history, memory and ancestry. Divided into 18 separate tracks, but heard as one continuous arc of sound, we enter into the leader's all-encompassing “panoramic sound quilting”, as she calls it, a reference both to her family’s handicraft heritage but also to the collage-like juxtaposition of her materials.Over a bowed pedal note in the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
If it seems mythical that a singer-songwriter in his early seventies has made an album this vital yet so timeless, then it’s worth pondering that Man & Myth is Roy Harper’s first for 13 years. In 2011, he celebrated his 70th birthday on stage but in the decade before his profile had been low, with time in his Irish home seemingly filled by anything that wasn’t creating new music. It might be making up for lost time, but Man & Myth’s 23-minute closing epic “Heaven Is Here”/“The Exile” is a career highlight. With 20 albums behind him (depending how it’s counted), the first of which came Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Ed Askew’s singing voice is made for melancholy. When not carrying a melody, his reedy vibrato becomes conversational, telling of a turtle laying her eggs, a baby crying in a cradle, a boy arguing with his girlfriend. The graceful, harpsichord-like tone of his Martin Tiple – a plangent, 10-string ukelele-sized instrument – makes the whole all the more wistful. Askew’s haunting, minor-key contemplations probably aren’t going to win him a wide audience but this, his sixth album in 45 years, brings Marc Ribot and Sharon Van Etten on board as collaborators.For the World is an album of great Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The Green Note had put up a Sold Out sign on Monday night when Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker stepped in to play a sometimes mesmerising set on the little stage by the door. It’s a great venue that a lot of big artists have stepped inside to test their real stature, and Clarke and Walker have a future that could see them grow their audience in the way that some of their heroes - Sandy Denny, Richard and Linda Thompson, Nick Drake, Bert Jansch, June Tabor – have done with three simple but rare ingredients: a compelling voice, dextrous guitar work and great songs.There were a few Sandy Denny Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
In a world of reality television show winners and interchangeable flash-in-the-pan singer-songwriter critical darlings, Frank Turner stands apart as the real deal. Over the past 18 months, you’d have been forgiven for thinking that Turner had appeared as if from nowhere and his name was suddenly everywhere. But the groundwork for the songwriter’s considerable recent successes - a pre-show slot at the London Olympics Opening Ceremony (pictured below), a sell-out show at Wembley Arena, his latest album reaching the top of the iTunes Chart and number two on the Official UK Album Chart - has been Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Arriving early on Saturday, the first music I was exposed to in the tranquil arboretum area of the Radio 3 Stage was the mesmeric and gorgeous sounds of Leicester sitarist Roopa Panesar floating from the stage, with dreamy oboe-like shenhai adding to the musical mix.I had brought some at times torrential rain with me, and there was something vaguely apocalyptic about Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band later on the same stage. His mystique was superb, looking like a younger member of ZZ Top with flowing beard, playing a guitar made of Winchester gun metal and a barn door. He was accompanied by a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Michael Hurley: Armchair Boogie / Hi Fi Snock UptownWith songs about werewolves, penguins, the English upper classes, trains, the police and more werewolves, these albums from surrealist folk maverick Michael Hurley are charming and occasionally disconcerting. His ramshackle delivery seems a little offhand but it brings an intimacy that can’t fail to worm its way in. Armchair Boogie (credited to Michael Hurley & Pals) was originally issued in 1971; Hi Fi Snock Uptown in 1972. Both originally came out Raccoon, the label run The Youngbloods.Armchair Boogie was the belated follow-up to Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Sunday evening was the last of a week of Kew the Music concerts – from Blondie to Paul Weller via Jools Holland and Leona Lewis – six nights, 8,000 people per night. The gate money is going towards the £400m facelift of the Temperate House, where the stage was set for the closing Sunday night of English and Scottish folk songs from Karine Polwart, Billy Bragg and Bellowhead.Polwart, with her brother Steven on guitar, and Fair Isle multi-instrumentalist Inge Thompson, delivered an early evening set of songs from her acclaimed recent album, Traces – "King of Birds", "Cover Your Eyes", "Tears Read more ...
joe.muggs
Somewhere round about 10 years ago the concept of “folktronica” settled down to become a relatively stable area of music. Fringe its appeal may have generally been, but it incubated some major talents who are still making great music, and for better or worse primed general music fans' ears for the sounds of folk and thus arguably laid the ground for the monstrous success of Mumford & Sons.This year has seen a subtle resurgence in the sound, with artists affiliated to the first wave of folktronica like Tunng, The Memory Band, Colleen and CocoRosie all making extremely fine albums. But Read more ...
joe.muggs
When Tunng started out in 2005, they were a peculiar proposition. Treading a fine line between Heath Robinson ramshackle and meticulous high-tech, ancient and hyper-modern, bone percussion and glitchy electronic sparkles, they certainly deserved the then-popular term “folktronica”. Though their melodies were unerringly catchy, their lyrics were so out-there, their lineup so unorthodox and their sound so psychedelic it was never likely they'd be more than a cult act.So why, last night, did they bring nothing to mind so much as Fleetwood Mac or Paul McCartney's Wings? Their new, fifth, album Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s just before midnight on Friday. A few hundred couples circle the floor of a school gym. On stage, violinists play a rhythmic music which cycles repetitively. Coloured with sad, minor notes, it sounds like a stately ancestor to bluegrass. Hands joined, the couples raise their arms above their heads. The woman spins. Breaking the link, the man suddenly bobs downwards, hops up and spreads his arms apart in a come-hither gesture. His partner’s raised hands say no. Linking arms at the waist, they resume the circuit.But he doesn't give up. He’ll try again and again to entice her. This is the Read more ...