folk albums
Album review: Ben Chasny – ‘The Intimate Landscape’: Six Organs’ driving light delivers an instrumental fingerstyle masterclass
LIKE all of us, I guess, Ben Chasny, the man behind the psychedelic guitar explorers Six Organs of Admittance, is a person of many facets; forget the personal here, we’re concerned with the musical. There’s the more carefree, garagey Ben we’ve seen laying down frayed and wholly lovable tunes, sometimes teetering on the edge of …
Album review: Devin Hoff – ‘Voices From The Empty Moor (Songs of Anne Briggs)’: the canon of the Notts folk free spirit judiciously reinvented
BASSIST Devin Hoff may well be one of those names little known to you, but whose invaluable contributions to a record you’ve likely loved; as a four-string sharpshooter of absolute repute he’s contributed to not far shy of a hundred releases by the likes of Julia Holter, Nels Cline, Xiu Xiu, Cibo Matto, Sharon Van …
Album Review: The Witching Tale – ‘The Witching Tale’
Take multi-instrumentalist Michael J. York (Coil, The Utopia Strong) and the incredible vocal talents of Katherine Blake (Mediaeval Baebes), and the end result is something totally out of this world – folklore and mysticism, early Arabian and Mediaeval music, first millennia Eastern poetry blended together with Poe, Scott and Chesterton. The result is an ethereal …
Album Review: Jackie Leven – Straight Outta Caledonia…The Songs of Jackie Leven
I remember vividly the first time that I heard ‘The Sexual Loneliness of Jesus Christ’ by outsider, Scottish troubadour Jackie Leven. It was 2001 and I was totally unprepared for and utterly mesmerised by the sheer audacity of Leven’s artistic reach and the epic sweep of his lyrics and music on that track. I couldn’t …
Album review: Alasdair Roberts og Völvur – ‘The Old Fabled River’: Scots-Norwegian sextet debut a record of correspondences, life cycles and exploratory depth
HE’S GRACED us with a very Northern European and delicious take on introspective folk since that trio of lovely albums, The Rye Bears A Poison, Daylight Saving and The Night Is Advancing as Appendix Out, beginning back in ’97; and it should come as no surprise that a man whose music arguably sounds best with …
Album review: Craig Fortnam – ‘Ark’: North Sea Radio man gathers his world in a prog-pastoral-folk craft of intricacy and thoughtfulness
ARCH GARRISON, whose lovely odyssey of modern Wessex psych-pastoralism The Bitter Lay we loved for all its exploration of thorny byways last year; a half-dozen or so long-playing outings in the North Sea Radio Orchestra; even back before the century’s turn, a solitary album with Shrubbies. In all these incarnations we’ve enjoyed and explored the …
Album review: Cameron Knowler – ‘Places Of Consequence’: a new music as old as the hills, immersive and atmospheric
TEXAN solo guitar practitioner and melodicist Cameron Knowler – whose lovely, exploratory album with Eli Winter, Anticipation, we fully embraced in early March – is unveiling his very first solo album with American Dreams this coming week. A lifelong Westerner and recent Los Angeles transplant, Knowler spent his childhood in Yuma, Arizona and Houston, Texas, …
Album review: Fuzzy Lights – ‘Burials’: Cambridge psych-folk prodigals grow a faerie ring of psych-folk, post-rock and more to lay your troubled bones within
IT’S BEEN all of eight years now since Cambridgeshire post-folk collective Fuzzy Lights have graced our ears with an album, that being Rule Of Twelfths; but the planets have aligned favourably for such a sonic missive and, scrying the near future, their fourth album of atmospheric acid-folk, Burials, will be handed down to us come …
Album review: Raoul Vignal – ‘Years In Marble’: a solid third chapter in an accomplished songwriting career
A small miracle of the independent European songwriting scene
Album: David Gray – Skellig
Folk troubadour Gray is on to his twelfth studio album titled ‘Skellig’. Which takes its name from a formation of precipitous rocky islands off the coast of Co. Kerry where in 600AD a group of monks set up a monastery, believing that leading such a merciful existence, they would leave the distraction of the human …