Folk
Album Review: Tunnel Traffic’s elegiac ‘Take my Power’ is a shimmering and immersive work of art
Adam Hachey is a brilliant and underappreciated song writer whose talent has been lauded by Backseat Mafia since almost our inception when he emerged with the band Meesh, creating a genre of what he termed anti-folk. His songwriting is in fact folkish, but with an indie pop sensibility and a more layered and rich approach. …
Track: Fink’s ‘Sort of Revolution’ is true to its word.
Fink is the kind of artist that makes you nostalgic for bygone times, old loves and the beauty of youth. He’s the artist that inspired many, following his own singer-songwriter journey that truly is adaptable to the times. He has released a beauty of a song ‘ Sort of Revolution’ ahead of his upcoming Album “IIUII” ( …
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: An Early Bird’s beautiful album ‘Diviner’ is a sparkling, romantic journey into the imagination
Milano-based troubadour Stefano De Stefano has been keenly admired by Backseat Mafia since our very birth when we lauded his band Pipers back in 2013 and then his solo stuff under the name An Early Bird. Stefano has shown dedication and passion for his craft throughout the years we have known him: beautifully composed and …
Track: Interstellar Tay expresses yearning and loss with the sparkling, effervescent ‘Garden Song’
‘Garden Song’ sets off with such a sparkling and effervescent style with its folk timbre and pop sensibilities that its inspiration – the passing of the fantastically named Interstellar Tay‘s grandfather – is hard to detect. The song is a celebration of a lost loved one: joyous and positive with its sing along choruses and …
See: Alasdair Roberts og Völvur lead you through the sombre, beautiful out-folk of ‘Nu Solen Går Ned’
WITH a rather gorgeous new record in cahoots with the Norwegian experimental folk collective Völvur just a little over a fortnight away now, our favourite Perthshire and formerly appendically removed songsmith Alasdair Robert has dropped one final teaser, in which he gives way front and centre to Völvur’s Marthe Lea for an absolutely beautiful Norwegian …
With his debut solo album just a fortnight away, Cameron Knowler invites us to contemplation in ‘Kuyina’
WITH HIS two-hander album with Eli Winter, Anticipation, an excellent study in guitar primitivism, just three months behind us in the rear-view mirror, Texas acoustic explorer is just a fortnight or so away from the release of his debut album proper, Places Of Consequence – a study of roots, memory and the land in the …
Album Review: Maple Glider’s ‘To Enjoy is the Only Thing’ is a breathtaking debut filled with an exquisite sense of longing and beauty
Maple Glider – the moniker of Melbourne resident Tori Zietsch – has a voice and delivery that is like someone whispering softly in your ear: it’s close and warm and very personal. There is a delicious immediacy to her music – recalling that Danish concept of Hyyge – a quality of cosiness and comfortable conviviality …
Rising: Meet La Bonte, and watch his new video for Don’t Let This Define Me
Ahead of the debut album under the moniker La Bonte, Don’t Let This Define Me, comes a single of the same name from the Southern Californian troubadour Garrett La Bonte, and it’s out today. For all of the sunshine of California, there’s something of the grey about the song, beautifully melancholy in a sort of …