folk music
Kieron Tyler
If there’s a feeling of déjà vu, it isn’t detectable. Conchúr White played St Pancras Old Church in April 2016 with County Armagh’s Silences, the band he fronted. This evening, a mention of having been here before is absent. Nothing in the body language suggests any familiarity with where he’s playing.Perhaps paying no heed to history is understandable. Conchúr – pronounced Conor – White is in London following the January release of Swirling Violets, the follow-up album to his 2021 self-issued solo debut. He, presumably, views where he is now as a clean break with a past which doesn’t need Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Anniversary is Canadian singer-songwriter Abigail Lapell’s sixth album (if we include last year’s lengthy EP of lullabies). Her success has not reached much beyond her native land, as is often the way with Canadian acts, but she’s a proven talent, one who deserves a higher international profile. Anniversary consists of 11 poetic folk-country meditations on love. However, anyone seeking musical representations of euphoria, joy and lust should look elsewhere for, lovely as it often is, the default setting here is a rich melancholia.The album is co-produced by her countryman Tony Dekker, of Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Parentheses, I is an album title – (I) – that’s a hieroglyph of the self, the brackets like shields facing opposite ways; and as an artist and performer, Josienne Clarke knows how to use a shield, and how to use a sword, too.In her albums, especially her recent trio of solo releases, she has taken up arms to redefined her self as an artist, a female singer-songwriter and a woman extricating herself from a duo partnership that may have brought her a BBC Folk Award, but seemed to have brought her to her knees, too. But that was then. Her current standing is to be among the most Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
It was her 2018 album Be the Cowboy which saw Mitski propelled to stardom status. Laurel Hell, which followed in 2022, saw her continue on the popstar trajectory with synth-heavy songs, so the more laid back folkiness of last year’s release, The Land is Inhospitable and So are We came as a bit of a surprise.Her gig at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall came with some deliberate seeming choices to cement her – at least for now – as a singer of folk-soaked country-style melodies as opposed to the brazen pop bangers of her last couple of records. The seats in the stalls remained, with the whole gig being Read more ...
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 ...