tue 19/03/2024

folk music

Album: Loreena McKennitt - The Road Back Home

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....

Read more...

Bill Bailey: Thoughtifier, Brighton Centre review - offbeat adventures with a whirling, erudite mind

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...

Read more...

Album: The Dead South - Chains & Stakes

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...

Read more...

Album: Katherine Priddy - The Pendulum Swing

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...

Read more...

John Francis Flynn, The Dome review - new trad and taped tin whistles

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...

Read more...

Album: Sarah Jarosz - Polaroid Lovers

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...

Read more...

Album: Nailah Hunter - Lovegaze

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...

Read more...

Albums of the Year 2023: Scott Dunn with Claire Martin and the RPO - I Watch You Sleep

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...

Read more...

Albums of the Year 2023: PJ Harvey - I Inside the Old Year Dying

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...

Read more...

Lankum, Roundhouse review - a warm evening of folk mastery

The folk band Lankum are (for want of a less cliched phrase) at the height of their power. Their gig at the Roundhouse, as they said themselves, was the biggest audience they had ever played for – and everyone was loving it. The Roundhouse,...

Read more...

Hozier, OVO Hydro, Glasgow review - sublime voice and a super-sized sound

There was something misleading about the opening of this concert. As Andrew John Hozier-Byrne and his band stepped onstage, the stage was lit up by a single spotlight, focused around the microphone that the singer stepped up to. Yet the following...

Read more...

theartsdesk on Vinyl 81: Nobro, Adrian Sherwood, Evian Christ, Ozric Tentacles, Maple Glider, Viken Arman and more

The first of two December theartsdesk on Vinyls which will appear in quick succession. This one's mostly new artists. The next one will be our Christmas Special, filled with seasonal fare and present-suitable reissues and boxsets. For the best...

Read more...
Subscribe to folk music