folk music
Thomas H. Green
In these meta times when everything – EVERYTHING! – is ironic, a smirk to be replayed forever on a screen, the last thing we expect is a hippy, a proper real-life hippy, preaching oneness and love. Even yoga sorts these days mostly go on about their own “wellness”, rather than the cosmic inference of it all. Nick Mulvey’s previous albums were lightly marinaded in Baba Ram Dass and ayahuasca revelation but, with his third solo album, New Mythology, he’s gone full mystic.After creating some of the most gorgeous, original singer-songwriter music of the last decade he doesn’t let empyrean Read more ...
Tim Cumming
As break-up albums go, Heidi Talbot’s new set knocks that tightly wound ball of heartbreak, separation and release into the front rank, on an arc of often beautifully melodic self-penned songs, choice covers, and accompanists including guitarist Mark Knopfler and fiddle player, singer and the album's producer Dirk Powell.After more than a decade of marriage and musical collaboration with fiddler John McCusker, Sing it for a Lifetime finds Talbot negotiating the rapids of that union’s end. The title song opens the album with a beguiling melody carrying hard-won words that speak of their Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The gentleman in the centre of the picture above is Ivan Dorn. In Ukraine, he’s a pop star. A big pop star. His music, as he puts it on stage during the show opening Tallinn-Narva Music Week, is “pure Ukrainian house music.” Yep, there’s the bing-bong piano lines and cowbell beats of the pop end of house.Before 24 February this year an Ivan Dorn live appearance would of course be fun, an uplifting experience with a jumping-up-and-down audience doing lots of arm waving. This is confirmed in Tallinn where his enviable charisma is tempered by a charming awkwardness telegraphing he’s not fully Read more ...
Joe Muggs
This album starts with an unfortunate sound. Its title track begins with the kind of drum loop that rock bands from U2 on down adopted in the early 1990s having heard Massive Attack and Happy Mondays and deciding that they were going to get on the groovy train. It’s unfortunate because as with all those Nineties bands, it remains completely beholden to a very Eighties Big Rock production style with over-egged notions of “fidelity”. Every element is neat, tidy, separated, sparkling – completely missing the point of what dance and hip hop producers were doing by hacking the possibilities of Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Not quite 50 and already Kate Rusby has notched up 30 years on the professional stage, an anniversary marked by a new album featuring newly recorded favourite songs from across her career on which “the Barnsley Nightingale” is joined by an array of special guests.Among them are compatriots Richard Hawley and KT Tunstall and, from across the Atlantic, Beth Nielsen Chapman, Sarah Jarosz and the gloriously talented Darlingside. For those buying the physical album there’s also the Royal Northern Sinfonia on a “full version” of “Secret Keeper”.The celebration opens in appropriately upbeat style Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Jono McCleery has one of those voices that once heard, demands your attention, an instrument of richness and depth, and one that has earned him many fans. The likes of Vashti Bunyan and Tom Robinson helped to crowdfund his recording debut back in 2008, Darkest Light; he steered himself through London’s eclectic electro-acoustic underground music scene alongside the likes of Jamie Woon and the Portico Quartet, and released four more folktronic-textured releases with Ninja Tune.His sixth album, on the Berlin-based Ninety Days Records, was recorded in early 2021, over five days in Rotterdam Read more ...
Tom Carr
Although the term “hipster” has become degraded to well beyond cliché, Kurt Vile is one of those artists whose fans may indeed have that in-the-know smugness. With Vile, though, this is not a bad thing. Given the increasingly confidence-shedding nature of recent world events, Vile’s mix of indie rock with psychedelia and Americana makes for a welcome escape.His first studio release since 2018’s Bottle It In, (Watch My Moves) – replete with brackets – is 15 tracks long. There’s a whole lot to dive into, beginning with “Going on a Plane Today”. With this piano-led curtain-raiser, Vile mixes in Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Expansive, free-form, handmade and improvised, the extravagantly-titled The Liquified Throne of Simplicity is the fourth album from this freewheeling Slovenian trio of multi-instrumentalists. They forage among the world’s musics as well as their own, making their own handmade instruments, and creating huge tracks redolent of a borderless musical world where the guembri rhythms of the opening 20-minute track, “Wilted Superstition Engaged in Copulation”, ring and resonate with the sound of chimes, balafon, ocorina flute, ribab and viola, the peeling Egyptian double-reeded mizmar, plus "various Read more ...
Liz Thomson
What an exquisite album! Beautiful voices that harmonise to perfection, superlative instrumental work, and songs both new and old yet all somehow familiar and timeless. Ink of the Rosy Morning: A Sampling of Folk Songs from Britain and North America is a lockdown album that captures the spontaneity that few of us felt during that dark time.Emerging in 2016 with Before the Sun, Hannah Sanders and Ben Savage – self-described “children of the folk clubs” – met in a Cambridge folk club doing floor spots, she having returned from America, he from a tour with The Willows. The chance encounter Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Acknowledging the contrast between personal and public situations, The Weather Station’s Tamara Lindeman says “I have a lot of songs about not being heard, yet I’m holding this microphone.” An individual’s voice can be ignored, but if it’s given a context which enables reaching out – it may be heard.The Weather Station’s February 2021 album, the pointedly titled Ignorance, framed her concerns about climate change and its horrifying effects as a broken relationship. It can be read as form of break-up album. However, the fissure examined is between humanity and the world hosting it. At the Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Norwegian artist Jenny Hval is a novelist as well as a singer-songwriter, and her new album certainly has a literary approach to music making.Classic Objects is made of up little stories set to music - standalone units of narrative outside of the usual verse and chorus structure. They’re not quite the made-up fables of folk but not quite a straight up representation of reality either, meandering between real life observation and constructed philosophical sketches.The title track, “Year of Love” introduces a theme which flows through the album – the analysis of a musician during a time when Read more ...
peter.quinn
When 2020 MacArthur Fellow and three-time Grammy Award winner Cécile McLorin Salvant previewed some of the material from her forthcoming album to an enraptured audience at Cadogan Hall as part of last year’s EFG London Jazz Festival, you sensed that something special was in the offing. But the treasure trove of marvels that is Ghost Song exceeds all expectations.Whether it’s the unaccompanied fragment of the sean-nós song “Cúirt Bhaile Nua” segueing into Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” (recorded in the beautiful acoustic of St. Malachy’s Church, New York), the imaginative splicing together of Read more ...