folk music
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Readers of a certain type of lifestyle blog will be familiar with the concept of hygge. The Danish word, which refers to a state of cosiness and good cheer in which to survive the winter months, is nothing new – but this year, it’s popping up everywhere badged as a lifestyle trend. Hygge in 2016 is grey-knit blankets that look homemade, but which retail for £100; it’s steaming, monogrammed mugs of hot chocolate and rose-gold pillows. And it’s In Winter, Katie Melua’s collaboration with the Gori Women’s Choir – basic, yes; but there’s a reason nobody can resist the tie-in candle collaboration Read more ...
peter.quinn
The human voice is as individual as a fingerprint: the emotional, melancholic pull of Billie Holiday; the slightly nasal, always ironic quality of Donald Fagen; the overheated melismas of Mariah Carey; and Michael Bolton, the aural equivalent of the Krakatoa eruption. Listening to “Carry On”, the lead single from her sixth solo album Day Breaks, Norah Jones's voice is characterised not only by its great tonal warmth but also by its conversational intimacy.The album is being billed as a return to the sound-world of her much garlanded debut Come Away With Me, which it is – to an extent. In fact Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In 1983, on the raucous punk-a-billy number “A13, Trunk Road to the Sea”, Billy Bragg affectionately sent up the parochial nature of Britain as compared to the USA (“If you ever have to go to Shoeburyness/Take the A-road, the okay road, that’s the best”). He’s always had a thing for the wide open spaces of America that inspired the blues, country and, eventually rock’n’roll. Now, in an almost documentary fashion, his latest pays tribute to the way trains once brought a nation together, albeit very far from “Pitsea, Thundersley, Hadleigh, Leigh-on-Sea”.Shine a Light, subtitled Field Recordings Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Johnny Lynch – the artist otherwise known as Pictish Trail – is one of the country’s most intriguing musicians. In 2010, he upped sticks and moved into a caravan on the remote island of Eigg, ensuring every appraisal of his work evermore would refer to him as a “hermit” or a “recluse”. And yet, despite the geographical challenges, Lynch somehow remains the life and soul of any party he cares to put his name to: festival curator (they come to him); label boss (releasing music into the world on the back of postcards, with coordinates rather than catalogue numbers); purveyor of the finest space- Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
While there will, if there is any justice, be plenty written about King Creosote’s Astronaut Meets Appleman, few will probably state what to me is obvious: this is a really, really sexy record. Now, being Scottish, I’m perhaps predisposed to believe that about anything that features what I can only describe as techno bagpipes - but I defy you to listen, really listen, to the sprawling seven-minute album opener “You Just Want” and not feel at least a little shiver. There’s a creak, a craving, to Kenny Anderson’s always expressive vocals, “can I be him?” almost the only variation on a droning Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 1969, a tranche of American musicians looked back to the country’s past for inspiration. Bob Dylan followed John Wesley Harding with Nashville Skyline. The Band’s eponymous second album hit the shops. The Flying Burrito Brothers debuted with The Gilded Palace of Sin. The rootsy was a default. But choosing to draw on country and Appalachian traditions did not have to mean playing it straight. On the amazing Farewell Aldebaren, Judy Henske and Jerry Yester used banjo and hammered dulcimer. They also employed the Chamberlain, a Mellotron-like instrument where the keyboard triggers tape Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Water has featured prominently in Lisa Hannigan’s work since striking out solo on 2008’s Mercury-nominated Sea Sew: water that caresses and relaxes; water that turns deadly and drowns. The water in At Swim is the water that the singer finds herself adrift in; the water that she had to cross between her home in Dublin and a new love in London as she pulled her third album together; and - yes, let’s go there - the water, murky and all-consuming, that typifies Aaron Dessner of The National’s production, and makes him Hannigan’s perfect foil.Like her previous work, the songs on At Swim perfectly Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Honestly, you wait years for a lengthy project to come to fruition, then two turn up at once. However, while The Avalanches had to contend with people tapping their watches and sighing wearily, The Earlies’ John Mark Lapham had only his own clock to watch. The measured pace and unhurried approach are reflected in the languorous song spectres he presents here.Starting out life as an idea for his short-lived 4AD outfit, the Late Cord, the project soon outgrew its shell and ended up a huge collaborative effort which sees turns from, among a Hollywood-sized cast, Sara Lowe (the Earlies), Swans’ Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Familiar words pepper the lead item on the 9am radio news: "Brexit", "Theresa May", "Boris Johnson". Yet the bulletin is delivered in the first language of the 49,000-population Faroe Islands. The self-governing region of Denmark may be a remote cluster of 18 North Atlantic islands, but the Britain-watching contagion has spread to a place which has never been a member of the EU. Denmark is. The Faroes aren't.The Faroes do it their way. How much so is apparent at the annual G! Festival, hosted by Syðrugøta. At the west end of the Gøtuvik fjord, the village of 416 looks classically Nordic and Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Becca Stevens’ limpid, luscious and artful fusion of Appalachian folk, jazz and indie rock found a perfectly empathetic setting in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, in an inspired choice for Lauren Laverne’s Wonder Women series of summer gigs. Stevens’ band began honing their connoisseur's stylistic melting pot more than a decade ago, and has been a fixture on the New York scene for some years. As she begins to make a name over here, British audiences are due for a treat. Stevens blends original compositions with covers of a broad range of sympathetic writers, from Usher to Joni Mitchell. Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Devonian singer and accordionist Jim Causley released Cyprus Well, settings of his relative Charles Causley's poems, in 2013. What may be his finest album to date, Forgotten Kingdom, came early this year, and now he has released a second album of poems, this time by the great 20th century Cornish poet Jack Clemo. It's part of a commission from the Bodmin Moor Poetry Festival, set to music in collaboration with Cornish writer and Clemo specialist Luke Thompson, and with a band including fiddler Richard Tretheway, dulcimer player Kerensa Wright and a legend of traditional Cornish music, Neil Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The names may be unfamiliar, but Folque and Undertakers Circus are as good as better-known bands. Despite being musical bedfellows neither Norwegian band is as esteemed as, say, Trader Horne and Trees or Colloseum and Lighthouse. Folque issued their eponymous debut album in 1974. Despite line-up changes, the band was active until 1984. Undertakers Circus issued two albums, the first of which was 1973’s Ragnarock. The original band ran out of steam around 1976. Original pressings of Folque fetch between £40 and £80. Ragnarock is very rare and sells for around £70. The reissue of each album is Read more ...