folk music
Thomas H. Green
There’s a crisis in popular musical vocals. They’ve reached a very naff stasis. After a decade-and-a-half of Cowell hegemony and stars that have risen during the same period, a generation thinks there are only two ways to express emotion. One is melismatic singing (for women – wandering wildly about the higher registers on every syllable, a la Mariah Carey/Whitney Houston), the other is voice-breaking (for men - cracking into a vulnerable falsetto a la Jeff Buckley/Coldplay). It’s all very boring. There are so, so many other ways to express emotion. Just ask Louis Armstrong, Ian Dury, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Jeremy Cunningham (b.1965) is bass player and a founding member of The Levellers, as well as being a visual artist in his own right. During the 1990s The Levellers, and most especially their 1991 album Levelling the Land, became a phenomenon. The group were punk-influenced folk-rockers whose songs were often polemic and political. It was no coincidence that their main flush of popularity was during the premiership of John Major. They became a focus for anti-government feeling, especially among those affiliated with the travelling and festival communities (remember Major’s “New age travellers Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Can you find a more extensive and comprehensive rundown of monthly vinyl releases than theartsdesk on Vinyl? We can’t. But then we would say that. Don’t believe us, though; below we surf punk, techno, film soundtracks, folk, major label boxset retrospectives, avant-garde electronica, pop, R&B and tons more. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHBelako Render Me Numb, Trivial Violence (Belako)Basque four-piece Belako create the most exciting new version of indie rock that theartsdesk on Vinyl has heard in a long while. In fact, it’s belittling to term it "indie" for this is a galloping hybrid that Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Fenne Lily is a young Bristolian singer-songwriter whose voice will take her far. Her debut album is decent enough, and there are songs on it that reach out and grab you by the guts, but it’s her extraordinary, fragile voice that stays in the mind. Lily’s oeuvre is folk-acoustica but run through with electronics and reverb, putting her in a haunted place where she sounds as if she belongs in one of Twin Peaks' more peculiar scenes.The obvious comparison for much of this album is Lana del Rey, although Lily's voice is higher pitched. There’s something about the way she rides chords and rhythms Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“When I was singing at my best, I was the essence of English song. And that was all I ever really wanted.” It’s said without pride and in a matter-of-fact manner. The speaker is Shirley Collins in the documentary The Ballad of Shirley Collins. Issued on DVD in a package with a CD collecting music which defines parts of her world, the film tracks a person balancing certainty about who she is and was with an enviable level-headedness.The Ballad of Shirley Collins is also issued as an album – a quasi-soundtrack of the film. But the version to get is the book-bound CD/DVD configuration Read more ...
peter.quinn
An album that enchants and surprises in equal measure, Heritage sees US sax player and composer Owen Broder explore the full gamut of American roots music – from blues and Appalachian folk to bluegrass and spirituals – through the prism of modern jazz.Subtitled ‘The American Roots Project’, Broder’s welcoming inclusiveness is evident from the outset, with his self-penned “Goin’ Up Home” transmogrifying from a simple folk chorale into driving swing and, neatly bookending the album, the collective improv of “A Wiser Man Than Me” which channels the singular sound-world of New Orleans.A Read more ...
Tim Cumming
I first saw Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker at the Green Note in Camden just as they released 2013's Fire and Fortune album. The room was packed and they were brilliant, their own songs mixed with traditional pieces and choice covers. What was striking was that their own songs didn’t pale, lyrically or melodically, beside the others. Something good was going on here, embodied by Clarke’s limpid voice of longing, refute, realisation, and melancholia, alongside Walker’s brilliance as a guitarist and arranger. Since then, they’ve signed to Rough Trade from which came 2016’s stellar set of Read more ...
Liz Thomson
The delicious flame-grilled burgers and the vast array of bourbons on offer at the Lexington, hard by yet another “King's Cross Quarter”, added atmosphere to the opening night of Diana Jones’s European tour. Finger licking is (quite rightly) not allowed during the music so those arriving early for a bite might have spotted Jones herself, refuelling with friends between sound-check and curtain-up.Not that the singer-songwriter called variously “the Emily Dickinson of song” and “the female Johnny Cash” needs props of any kind. In venues far larger than the Lexington, Jones creates the kind of Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Since forming in 2013, The Gloaming have set about transforming how Irish traditional music is heard, received and performed. There is no other group like them, and none with the sheer heft of brilliance that fiddler Martin Hayes, viola/hardanger player Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, sean nos singer Iarla Ó Lionáird, American pianist Thomas Bartlett and guitarist Dennis Cahill demonstrate on their two studio albums, and on this superlative live set from Dublin’s National Concert Hall, which has become something of a home-from-home for the group (Martin Hayes is the venue’s artist in residence) – Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The similarity is intentional. The cover design of When the Day is Done – The Orchestrations of Robert Kirby nods explicitly to that of Nick Drake’s debut album Five Leaves Left. That wasn’t just the first record by the singer-songwriter, it was also first time most people heard Kirby’s string arrangements. He and Drake had been friends at Cambridge University. The album’s producer Joe Boyd commissioned arrangements by Richard Hewson but Drake rejected them and the call was made to Kirby, who had already worked with him live.For Kirby, this was the beginning of a career which flourished until Read more ...
Barney Harsent
There was a hint of what was to come in Gwenno Saunders’ debut, Y Dydd Olaf. It was, for the most part, a Welsh-language affair, save for the closing track “Amser”, a song sung in Cornish and the album’s dizzying slow dazzle. For her follow-up, Le Kov, Gwenno has chosen to record an entire album in this Brythonic language that has, in recent times, gamely rallied itself from UNESCO-declared death.Le Kov, then, exists as a document of a living language, albeit one that the majority of listeners will have no working knowledge of. In order to make real sense of the songs, we have to do the Read more ...
Liz Thomson
“Chestnut-brown canary, ruby-throated sparrow” sang Stephen Stills in his “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes”, a song from CSNY’s 1969 debut album to Judy Collins, with whom he was ending a two-year affair. Collins’s big baby-blue eyes haven’t faded with time. Nor has her voice – indeed, it is far more secure now than it was 40 years ago, when she was battling pills and booze, a fight she’s documented in a number of books.Collins was a star in 1969; CSNY were making their celebrated Woodstock debut and that iconic first album had harmonies that were spine-chillingly beautiful and pitch-perfect. The tie- Read more ...