folk music
Album: Shirley Hurt - Shirley HurtSaturday, 02 December 2023
The realisation that Shirley Hurt is the name assumed by Canada’s Sophia Ruby Katz for recording helps explain why her debut album is so oblique. As well as the cloaked identity, what seem initially to be direct songs cleaving to familiar musical... Read more... |
Oh What A Lovely War, Southwark Playhouse review - 60 years on, the old warhorse can still bare its teethMonday, 27 November 2023
In Annus Mirabilis, Philip Larkin wrote,"So life was never better than In nineteen sixty-three (Though just too late for me) – Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban And the Beatles' first LP."That might be the only point... Read more... |
Album: Catrin Finch & Aoife Ni Bhriain - Double YouSaturday, 25 November 2023
Two weeks ago, Welsh harpist Catrin Finch and Irish fiddler, violinist and Hardanger fiddle player Aoife Ni Bhriain entranced their audience at the Union Chapel in North London, playing from their new album, Double You, as part of the London Jazz... Read more... |
Album: Abigail Lapell - LullabiesWednesday, 22 November 2023
Abigail Lapell is a singer feted and given awards in her homeland of Canada, but who has yet to reach far outside it. Folk is her metier but only insofar as it’s Joni Mitchell’s.Five albums into her career, inspired by COVID lockdown-induced... Read more... |
Album: Kurt Vile - Back to Moon BeachMonday, 20 November 2023
Back to Moon Beach is a collection of new, reworked and covered songs that feels like a gift from Kurt Vile for his fans to dissect. He jokingly refers to the EP, which is just under an hour long, as “a KV comp”, an appropriate description given the... Read more... |
Christine Tobin, EFG London Jazz Festival, World Heart Beat review - an enchanting ode to homeSaturday, 18 November 2023
This UK premiere of the award-winning, Dublin-born vocalist and composer Christine Tobin’s latest project, Returning Weather, presented an otherworldly ode to finding home – casting multiple perspectives on our yearning for connection and human... Read more... |
Album: Cat Power Sings Dylan - The 1966 Royal Albert Hall ConcertWednesday, 08 November 2023
Cat Power, aka singer-songwriter Chan Marshall, is releasing her first live album – a recording of the faithful recreation of Bob Dylan’s infamous gig of 1966, played in November 2022 at the Royal Albert Hall.Dylan’s transformative gig actually took... Read more... |
Album: Rachel Sermanni - Dreamer AwakeTuesday, 19 September 2023
It was more than a decade ago when I first saw Rachel Sermanni in concert, in the upstairs room at The Old Queen’s Head in Islington, London, for a Nest Collective night. She had yet to release her debut, 2012’s Under Mountains, but was already... Read more... |
Hardanger Musikkfest 2023 review - fertility, folk music and the supernatural unite along Norway’s fjordsThursday, 07 September 2023
The cows are scattered across the mountains. Without scrambling up the slopes, the only way to summon them is to call. Unni Løvlid is beckoning them. Instead of standing outdoors she is in the medieval Ullensvang Church, in the Norwegian village of... Read more... |
Album: Kristin Hersh - Clear Pond RoadWednesday, 06 September 2023
Kristin Hersh’s voice, it transpires, is ageless. In the 80s when Throwing Muses broke through, she hit a particular combination of tones – blurring boundaries between harsh and smooth, melodic and discordant, trad and weird – that became vastly... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: Playing for the Man at the Door - Field Recordings from the Collection of Mack McCormickSunday, 13 August 2023
Between the late 1950s and around 1971, Robert “Mack” McCormick (1930–2015) travelled through his base-state Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, west Louisiana and parts of Arkansas and Oklahoma looking for musicians to record. It wasn’t a random process:... Read more... |
Album: William The Conqueror - Excuse Me While I VanishThursday, 03 August 2023
Ruarri Joseph is not a household name but in a Sliding Doors scenario, he might have been. Scottish, raised in New Zealand, and based in Cornwall, he signed to Atlantic in 2007, and had the same management as Damien Rice and David Gray. His output... Read more... |
