folk music
Kieron Tyler
Estonia’s Mart Avi styles himself as “the twilight samurai of alternative pop”. He creates “nowhere-somewhere music, mapping uncharted territories between avant-pop and timeless grandeur”. The characterisations are issued via AVICORP, his internet presence.The in-person Mart Avi has an arresting charisma; a star quality making it impossible not to be drawn in by his 40-minute performance at Tallinn Music Week. The look could be enough – cutting a David Bowie and Brett Anderson dash. Despite what he says about its nebulousness, his music is a moody electropop with shades of The Associates, Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Paul Simon is an ornery bugger. Full of awkwardness and perversity as a person, seemingly hugely detached, but as an artist capable of as much tenderness and directness as just about anyone out there. Capable of making world-changing artistic statements but queering his pitch with bizarrely, unnecessarily reactionary statements or actions. Really, a very weird man.But thankfully, he’s never gone all the way into cantankerousness. He’s not a Morrissey, so high on his own farts that the perversity becomes his entire persona, and every action and word is layered with provocation and second Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Life is better together, and the beauteous sounds created by The Milk Carton Kids proves it. Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan got their acts together in 2011, having each pursued solo careers that never quite gelled. Ryan pitched up at a Pattengale gig in Eagle Rock, California, which was home for both of them.They recorded their first album live at Zoey’s Café in Ventura a few months later and would soon be featured in the all-star line-up for Another Day, Another Time: Celebrating the Music of Inside Llewyn Davis. Now comes their sixth studio album, their first since The Only Ones, a short Read more ...
Tim Cumming
“YOUR NEW ALBUM IS FUCKING DEADLY!” hollers a voice from the depths of a full house at the Barbican on Thursday night, the first date on the north Dublin band’s UK tour for their stunning new album, False Lankum.Queue it up for your listening pleasure, and you’re going to be submerged in a sonic netherworld raised up by the four-piece’s panoply of organic drones seemingly captured in an echo chamber of epic proportions, with funereal drum taps, singer Radie Peat’s voice at its most haunted and disembodied, and more reminiscent of Heathen Earth-era Throbbing Gristle than anything heard before Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Lucy Farrell has a singular voice, contained and controlled but subtle and expressive. Since graduating from Newcastle’s folk course in the noughties she’s performed and recorded as a duo with Jonny Kearney, as one quarter of the BBC Folk Award-winning Furrow Collective, alongside further musical adventures with Carthy, Oates, Farrell & Young, and Eliza Carthy’s Wayward Band.Now she is releasing her long-awaited solo album of original songs, recorded at Wenlock Abbey in Much Wenlock, home to actress Gabrielle Drake, sister of Nick. It was his piano and guitar that were used in these Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In today’s Britain, too many concert reviews have to begin with the vandalistic threats of damage or extinction that hang over their performers. Last week, it emerged that the BBC’s bosses may be open to negotiate an alternative future for its Symphony Orchestra that does not involve 20 per cuts in the personnel.We shall see: what’s beyond doubt is that Saturday’s programme at the Barbican saw a full-strength BBCSO, under their stalwart champion Sakari Oramo, display an exhilarating level of prowess and flair in every department. Others can, and will, ask why Britain’s national institutions Read more ...
Tim Cumming
If you key in "Josienne Clarke" on Google, you’ll hit on the "About" section of her website, and the following declaration sets up her stall: "No label, no musical partner, no producer. Clarke is in complete control of her songwriting, arranging, producing, release schedule and musical direction."Onliness is her third solo album, following on from 2019’s In All Weather, 2021’s expansive A Small Unknowable Thing, as well as a couple of EPs, I Promised You Light, and a covers EP Now and Then. Onliness is a band album, with Clarke’s voice, guitar, piano and saxophone, backed up by her partner, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Two drummers are drumming. One held the beat on ABBA’s “Super Trouper”. He is Sweden’s Per Lindvall, more usually associated with jazz. The other is Norway’s Rune Arnesen, whose recording credits are also stylistically varied. Locked-in tight together, their groove provides the backbone for a band led by Norwegian trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær, whose 1996 album Khmer was his first for the ECM label. This is a live revisitation of the album.Also in the seven-piece outfit on stage is guitarist Eivind Aarset, who was on the album. Though there are solos, the groove binds together a hard-hitting, Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Anyone who’s heard even a smidgin of Reg Meuross’s music will know what a wonderful writer he is, homing in on often painful aspects of our shared history and retelling it in powerful and poignant songs that make any half-sentient listener want to explore further – both the history and his music.The weekend before lockdown, Meuross played a concert at Green Note in Camden Town, sharing the small stage with David Massengill, another extraordinary writer. Among the songs he sang that day – to a packed audience that had not yet heard of social distancing – was “The Boundary Stone,” a song about Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
On Domestic Sphere, Josephine Foster’s guitar and voice are joined by clacking crickets, a flock of sheep and wailing cats recorded in La Janda in southern Spain. There are also Colorado and Tennessee's birds and frogs. Foster’s great-grandmother is here too, her singing recorded around 1970: the voice from the past enters proceedings suddenly but not jarringly on the album’s ninth track “Reminiscence”.For Foster, this domestic sphere appears to be a figurative space which is spiritual as well as physical. Domestic Sphere ends with the suitably titled “Sanctuary” but the preceding tracks Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Ten years ago, three leading young English folk musicians got together in a room and swapped some tunes – Rob Harbron, whose English concertina graced the likes of The Remnant Kings and Emily Portman’s albums; melodeon player Andy Cutting, a three-times winner of Radio 2’s Folk Musician of the Year; and former Bellowhead alumni and fellow Musician of the Year, fiddler Sam Sweeney.Together, they chose the name Leveret, a term for a young hare, and went on to record a set of ancient English tunes, including an epic, drone-tastic take of “The Abbots Bromley Horn Dance”, and went on to revive an Read more ...
Tim Cumming
This double album takes Van Morrison back to one of his early muses – Skiffle and its repertoire, that precursor to the rock'n'roll years that took hold of Britain in the 1950s, having percolated across the USA through the first half of the century, combining folk, blues, country, bluegrass and jazz into one steaming head of home-brewed folk, hopped up on washboards, jugs, washtub bass and the like.It was arguably the first flame of the fire that consumed the music world of the 1960s as Skiffle-addicted teens like Van grew into leaders of the Sixties beat boom and the subsequent invasion of Read more ...