folk music
Lisa-Marie Ferla
When you listen to J Mascis’ solo work – 2011’s Several Shades of Why in particular, and now this follow-up – it’s hard to imagine him doing anything else. Which is ridiculous, of course: as frontman of still-active slacker-rockers Dinosaur Jr. Mascis has been an influential figure in alternative rock circles for years. But I challenge you to listen to the way his warm, creaky voice meanders its way through the songs on Tied to a Star, like the sound of somebody talking to himself as he fumbles his way through a musical diary entry, and tell me that it is not a perfect fit.Which is not to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Troubadours - Folk and the Roots of American Music Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4This is one of the most important reissues of the year. As the year ends, it may become the most important. Troubadours - Folk and the Roots of American Music is a set of four, individual three-CD sets charting the evolution of the American folk-based singer-songwriter style from its roots and influences to when it became a default mode of expression in the mid-Sixties and later.All-encompassing are words underselling Troubadours. Everything which should be, and everyone who needs to be, is here Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The danger of working successfully in many genres is that fans come to expect something revolutionary with each release. A secondary threat is that you succumb to generic schizophrenia, and thus are never quite sure which voice to speak with. Fin Greenall, founder/leader of the folk-blues trio Fink, has a touch of both of these in this latest release, in which songs of menacing Americana sit somewhat uneasily alongside pieces of lugubrious personal reflection. He may be feted for his eclecticism; he’s more likely to suffer for failing to please all his fans. The title track and “Pilgrim Read more ...
Tim Cumming
There are two Richard Thompsons – the deft acoustic magician and the electric guitarist shaking the rafters and the bones of the most committed air-guitar headbangers. He's unique in that no other guitarist could kick out the jams on the electric and seduce and beguile with the acoustic the way Thompson does.While his records are band affairs, his stage work encompasses band and solo acoustic tours. I recall seeing him in a small club in Paris, in the early 2000s, playing one of the best acoustic sets I’ve ever heard, and though it’s more than 30 years old now, one of my favourite Thompson Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Ostensibly folk, Emma Tricca’s second album Relic sounds more like a devotional song cycle heard in a church than on a club or festival stage. The massed chorale of Tricca’s voice which opens “Sunday Reverie”, the spectral organ of “Golden Chimes” and the lyrics of “Take me Away”, which yearn of being transported to somewhere she has never been where the trees are aging, all invoke the search for the spiritual.Initially pegged as a Greenwich Village-fascinated folkie inspired by encounters with John Renbourn and Bob Dylan's early champion Odetta, Tricca's voice is as singular and as Read more ...
peter.quinn
Impressively old sea shanties with stacked up vocal harmonies and sing-along choruses. Check. Captivating explorations of desire, drink and death. Check. Luxuriant, high spec arrangements presenting an ear-catching crazy quilt of influences. Check. Newly signed to Island Records, in this fifth studio album the award-winning 11-piece folk band sprinkle their usual magic over a bracingly fresh and brilliantly constructed collection of songs.While some albums drift benignly into your consciousness, others begin with a figurative grabbing of your lapel. Revival falls very much into the latter Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Something about First Aid Kit has always seemed a little too polished, too perfect. While there can be no denying that their 2012 breakthrough record The Lion’s Roar is a rich, lovely listen – in no small part thanks to the charm of Klara and Johanna Söderberg’s effortless harmonies – its strict adherence to the trail blazed by its transatlantic influences kept me from finding it as magical as the rest of the world seemed to. If the question is how do two sisters from Stockholm follow something as technically perfect as that album on their major label debut, its first single “My Silver Lining Read more ...
Tim Cumming
They've performed together on stage and in the studio since the first Waterson:Carthy albums of the early 1990s, but this is the first time Martin and Eliza Carthy have recorded as a duo, and they've kept it lean and clear with just their voices, Eliza's fiddle and Martin's guitar – each element distinct enough by itself, but together creating a very pure, personal kind of austere beauty. There's no excess baggage, and the tunes are handled with the kind of expertise, love and assured interpretation that comes with a lifetime's immersion.The opening “Her Servant Man” is a succinct Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Denmark’s Broken Twin take the lead in the latest of theartsdesk’s regular round-ups of the new music coming in from Scandinavia. Debut album May is melancholy. Minimally arranged, with lyrics addressing the pain brought by the passing of time, bleakness in the form of metaphorical references to weather and what happens after death, this is an affecting album. The sense of a lonely despair is reinforced by the defeated, distant voice of Majke Voss Romme – who is Broken Twin. May might fit clichés about Nordic chill, but the album draws from and sits proudly alongside landmark works of the Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Nobody ever accused, say, Dylan of having a voice that didn't mature with his songwriting. It’s something that springs to mind every time I try to put my finger on exactly why I’ve never warmed to the country-folk sounds of Conor Oberst’s latter work. Stylistically, the music is beautiful and while the lyrics may not be steeped in the same visceral poetry of Oberst’s Bright Eyes days they’re still a cut above most contemporary songwriting. But the quivering timbre of the voice that gave that band its visceral, emotional core or that wrung itself raw fronting early 00s emo act Desaparecidos is Read more ...
peter.quinn
Materializing out of London's thriving traditional Irish music scene, this debut recording from new five-piece CrossHarbour presents an 11-track collection whose appeal should go way beyond traditional Irish music initiates. Featuring a judicious mix of tunes and songs, the quintet's musicianship is fabulously impressive.In flute player Órlaith McAuliffe the band has a once-in-a-generation talent, a brilliant, preposterously accomplished musician who has bagged so many All-Ireland titles that her mantelpiece must be groaning under the weight. The band's other melody player, fiddler Sam Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
At last night’s Eurovision Song Contest, host country Denmark submitted “Cliché Love Song”, a weedy Bruno Mars-a-like designed to ensure they did not win for a second year running. It came ninth. While understandable that Danish national broadcaster DR would try to duck the expense of staging the extravaganza in Copenhagen again in 2015, they could have displayed some imagination by choosing an entrant that was certainly not a winner but had some worth. Instead of Basim wth his paper-thin “Cliché Love Song”, Aalborg’s Get Your Gun would have made a grand choice to showcase Denmark in fine Read more ...