folk music
Thomas H. Green
Around eight years ago, London singer-songwriter Lail Arad started releasing one-off tracks with Canadian singer JF Robitaille, once of Montreal indie outfit The Social Register (Arad’s own 2016 album The Onion is an undiscovered diamond that should be sought out).The pair now finally release a debut album which contains a few of these singles (although not “The Photograph” and “We Got It Coming”– Spotify those two). Their literate indie guitar-pop, touched with alt-folk sensibilities, is a sprightly listen spotted with a few true jewels.It's music built for these times. The chirpily doomed, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHFrank From Blue Velvet I Am Frank (Property of the Lost) + Column258 Interloper (The Workshop Sessions, Volume One) (Property of the Lost)Hastings label Property of the Lost has grown into a potent force, its stable of artists impressive, usually attached to a US-indebted garage aesthetic. Local band Frank From Blue Velvet’s eponymous 2022 debut was a tasty amalgam of southern gothic country filtered through punk sensibilities, its stand-out song, “Church of Prosperity” a deathless hit at Theartsdesk on Vinyl Mansions. I Am Frank steps forward and sideways, offering a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
After the evening’s second song “The Last of England,” Patrick Wolf cautions “I’ve got nothing left to say.” During the shows leading up to this outing promoting his new album Crying the Neck, he says he felt “like I’ve been drag-queen story hour” and, in Kingston, “a preacher.” He’s talked out. All that there is to say has been said.Of course, this does not prove to be the case. There is tons to relate. He says the album’s “On Your Side” was written on bus journeys between central London’s Gray’s Inn Road and the Royal Marsden Hospital. How, now he lives in Kent rather than London, that Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Forest and the Shore” by Keith Christmas is remarkable. In his essay for Gather In The Mushrooms, compiler, author and Saint Etienne member Bob Stanley says it is “as evocative as its title. The song has a deeply wooded sound, like a cross between Serge Gainsbourg’s “Ballade de Melody Nelson” and Ralph Vaughan Williams.” To this can be added the brooding, dramatic melancholy of Scott Walker’s “The Seventh Seal.”Despite the grandeur of “Forest and the Shore” – and the astounding Richard Thompson-esque, Tom Verlaine-predicting guitar solo taking it to its close – Gather In The Mushrooms: The Read more ...
Anthony Cecil
I think The Ballad of Wallis Island is the best British romcom since I Know Where I’m Going! (1945), which it closely resembles.In the earlier film, an unexpected love affair develops on a remote Scottish island that is cut off by stormy weather. The fictional Wallis Island is off the coast of Wales, not Scotland, yet director James Griffiths makes the same poetic use of landscape that characterises the Powell and Pressburger classic. Both movies are about love and nostalgia, but whereas the primary conflict of I Know Where I’m Going! is class, the corresponding fault line in The Ballad off Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Nick Mulvey’s first two albums, First Mind in 2014 and Wake Up Now in 2017, are among the loveliest singer-songwriter fare released this century. With his last album, 2022’s New Mythology, his ayahuasca-fuelled search for spiritual meaning went full-blown mystic. Where has it led him? To Jesus.The first Dark Harvest album (the second is due in the autumn) is touched by Christianity, notably on the slightly preachy “My Maker” (“God shares His secrets with those who fear Him”). But, like Bob Dylan’s first Born Again outing, Slow Train Coming, upon occasion the spark of religion lights the fuse Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHEmily Saunders Moon Shifts Oceans (The Mix Sounds)It’s de rigeur nowadays, if you love music, to love Joni Mitchell. She is, of course, a great soul, but her music never connected here. That said, I have a favourite Joni Mitchell song. It’s the 1975 number “The Dry Cleaner From Des Moines”. I also have a soft spot for the parent album, Mingus. Mitchell was accompanied on it by Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and Jaco Pastorius. A red hot line-up. Jazz fusion usually goes down like cold sick round here but Mitchell's foray is the exception to the rule. A decade ago Emily Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
James Crabb is a musical magician, taking the ever-unfashionable accordion into new and unlikely places, through bespoke arrangements of a spectrum of pieces which brim with wit and inventiveness. This lunchtime concert with violinist Anthony Marwood was a sheer joy, as they together traversed a range of style and tone, richly entertaining a very decent Bank Holiday crowd in the Wigmore Hall.The starting point was an obvious one: the tangos of Astor Piazzolla. This sequence of three run together had a reassuring familiarity, and a strong whiff of the Parisian café. The swooning violin melody Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Lucy Farrell, one quarter of the brilliant, award-winning Anglo-Scots band Furrow Collective, and a solo artist whose stunning debut album, We Are Only Sound, was released in 2023, divides her time between the UK – she’s a native of Kent – and Prince Edward Island, a musically rich parcel of land off Canada’s eastern seaboard. The island is home to the other half of this sublime folk-acoustic double bill, Juno Award-winning songwriter Catherine MacLellan.They’re playing small venues across the UK till the end of the merrie month of May – the Blaxhall Sessions in Suffolk and the Hungate Church Read more ...
joe.muggs
I’ve got an admission: I never really got Radiohead, in no small part because of Thom Yorke’s singing. I appreciate his technical abilities and songwriting, and that a lot of people find his anguish cathartic, but the more he goes for it the more I switch off.Even in gentler and less rockist songs he tends to go for a keening sound that still jangles my nerves. Rather like Paul Weller (not someone I imagine he’s compared to very often) straining to express intensity seems to have become a vital part of his musical brand, but just like Weller, I infinitely prefer it when he sits back a bit and Read more ...
Amelia Coburn
“Sandra” is one of my favourite tracks from my album Between The Moon and the Milkman which was released last year. While living in Paris a few years ago I shared a flat with an older French lady. We loved to chat every night when I came home from work, but one time she told me a story that stayed with me about her late husband, who was an abusive alcoholic. When he died, his only final wishes were to be buried. So of course, she had him cremated.I couldn’t stop thinking about her story, and knew that one day I wanted to write a song about it. A few months later, in Mexico, I had quite Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There’s this mod milieu, harking back to the Eighties. Weller at the forefront; Dr Robert and his Blow Monkeys; all righteously hate Thatcher; then the electronically groovy 1990s arrive; Acid Jazz Records; boss mod Eddie Piller; his collection of snappily dressed muso's who magazines wrote about and who nearly had hits. These sorts are still about, endlessly churning out music. It’s impressive. Sometimes the music is too. As with this album.Matt Deighton was in Acid Jazz outfit Mother Earth. He’s one of the aforementioned who keep on bangin’ out music. Much of it well-liked. Those mods Read more ...