folk track
News: New Model Army’s Justin Sullivan announces May solo set; hear the stark storytelling of ‘Amundsen’
NEWS which will delight members of the Militia worldwide: Justin Sullivan, founder of Bradford post-punk legends New Model Army, fierce social advocate and commentator, has announced he’ll be releasing only his second solo album come early May, 18 years on from the previous, Navigating By The Stars. It’s entitled Surrounded, will comprise sixteen new songs …
Track: Panteon – ‘Nobody’: electric folk lushness from Berlin
CURRENTLY based in Berlin, singer-songwriter Yvonne Ambrée writes, records and produces all of her music under the guise of Panteon. She’s gradually unveiling her forthcoming debut album with a string of singles throughout the year; and her latest release is “Nobody”, out today across all digital streaming platforms. It’s the kind of electric alt.folk loveliness …
Track: Le Ren and Buck Meek cover Gordon Lightfoot’s ‘Early Morning Rain’ with sweet delicacy
MONTREAL chanteuse Le Ren has gotten together with Big Thief’s solo guitarist Buck Meek for a tender, delicate rerub of Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot’s “Early Morning Rain”, which featured on his 1966 debut album. If you know Gordon Lightfoot’s catalogue, you know he’s never one to shout his considerable melodic chops from the rooftops – …
Track: Ted Barnes feat. Michael Clarke – ‘Way Beyond This’: a delicate acoustic tune telling of the moment your lover leaves
YOU MAY or may not have been blessed enough to have swooned for Clayhill, the cruelly underrated trio who got lumped into the semi-trendy genre ‘The New Acoustic’ by the music press alongside the likes of Lowgold and Kings of Convenience, which definition did them a massive disservice. Seek ye their albums; for further evidence …
Track: Chloe Foy – ‘Left-Centred Weight’: luscious, hook-laden folk to welcome spring
AS 2021 stretches and tentatively decides to dangle an experimental leg out of bed you, like me, will be looking round for the first buds and flowers of spring; new musical talent to get excited about, to bring us fresh, bright melodies. Step forward clutching the butter yellow of early daffs please, Chloe Foy; this …
Track: Cameron Knowler & Eli Winter share the spiralling guitar wonder of ‘Parapraxis of a Dragonfly’
TWO ADEPT young guns of the fingerstyle guitar, Cameron Knowler and Eli Winter really came to appreciate each other on a winter tour of the Trans-Pecos region of West Texas. The Trans-Pecos is a land of stark beauty, of ghost towns and mountain ranges. The pair spent the winter of 2018 gigging through the small …
Track: Brooks Williams, Findlay Napier, Boo Hewerdine and Kris Drever – ‘Farewell To Gold’: cult singers in quartet for a dream made reality
IT’S PRETTY much a cult, folky singer-songwriting dream; despite the lockdown and the all of it, that Cambridge Americana adept Brooks Williams, former The Bible! man Boo Hewerdine, Scotland’s Findlay Napier and Lau singer and potent artist in his own right, Kris Drever, should combine forces in song. … And so it came to pass, …
Track: Bill MacKay and Nathan Bowles – ‘I See God’: that old time religion beautifully recast for guitar and banjo
KEYS, the soon-come long-playing conversation between Chicago’s Bill MacKay on guitar and North Carolina’s Nathan Bowles at the banjo, ranges back and forth across the great bluegrass and guitar soli traditions, both pushing forward with free-flying chemistry and grounding their essaying in the canon of the form; and it’s the latter angle they’re examining on …
TRACK: Renée Reed – ‘Où est la fée’: a mystical tale from the Louisiana backwoods
HAILING from Lafayette, Louisiana, Renée Reed has followed up her excellent first single, “Fast One”, with a French language track, “Où est la fée” today. It’s the first song she’s released in French, reflecting her roots in the culture of her home state; and we’re told it’s one of two such on her self-titled debut album, out next month …
TRACK: Bill Stone – ‘Purple’: lost psych-folk nugget gets a reissue
YOU MAY think we’ve been there, got the T-shirt, seen it all where it comes to long-lost psych singer-songwriters of the Sixties and Seventies. Yep, we’ve adored and come to revise the place of history for artists like Bill Fay, Vashti, Gary Higgins; Linda Perhacs. They’re embraced, lauded, careers rejuvenated. We’ve mined it dry; we …