Category: folk-rock


This legendary solo performance, originally captured for broadcast on the King Biscuit Flower Hour, stands as a testament to David Crosby’s indomitable spirit and unparalleled artistry. Emerging from a dark chapter following his time in prison, Crosby delivers a profoundly moving and musically rich experience that resonates deeply with fans. Blending his soulful solo work with timeless CSNY classics, this concert not only marks his triumphant return but also chronicles his journey from the brink of despair to a resurgence of creative brilliance. It’s a rare and unforgettable glimpse into the heart of a true music legend.
The album captures a concert from 1989, marking a period of Crosby’s creative resurgence after a difficult time.

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Following on from the Second Language’s label recent re-emergence out of semi-hibernation, with The Declining Winter’s still-sublime Last April, comes a return-within-a-return from visual artist and onetime pastoral-psych legend Mark Fry. Having previously brought 2011’s baroque-tinged I Lived in the Trees (with backing assistance from The A. Lords) and 2014’s soothingly lush South Wind, Clear Sky to the 2L catalogue, after a decade or so’s gap arrives the meta-anointed Not On the Radar.
Although a long-time coming, this is far from being a laboured long-player. Recorded in loose yet finessed fashion in his Normandy painting studio, with integral multi-instrumentalist input from returning accomplices…

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A lot of tribute/cover albums can often leave you a little underwhelmed and wondering if the artist is just going through the motions or has run out of ideas. Positively Folk Street is most definitely not one of those albums.
You can feel the sincerity and gratitude that Steve Knightley has put into these twelve songs. Six are Bob Dylan covers, and the others are traditional songs that have been sung over the years by numerous artists, but most notably influenced by Martin Carthy.
The songs have been stripped back to Knightley’s distinctive voice and guitar with a little occasional harmonica and cuatro. It has a distinctive busking quality, which from someone…

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Somewhere in the ‘60s, the folk movement and the psychedelic rock scene intersected and a new sound emerged combining mellow acoustic sounds with further-out ideas that broke from folk traditions. This psychedelic folk-rock sound was wide-ranging, from the more straightforward sounds of bands like Fairport Convention and early Jethro Tull to the acid-tripping bliss of communal groups like the Incredible String Band.
The Magic Forest is the second entry in a series of compilations that began with 2022’s Deep in the Woods, again collecting artifacts of enchanted, pastoral psychedelic folk from between 1968 and 1975. Cherry Red’s anthologies generally intersperse obscure acts among the better known artists of the genre or topic they’re focused on,…

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Whilst working as a contract sheep shearer across the hill farms of Wales, Tom Jenkins wrote poems inspired by the stories of his fellow workers and the harsh realities of Wales’ industrial and agricultural heritage. Mixing English and Welsh languages, Jenkins has crafted these poems into the collection of 10 songs that make up When the Coal Dust Settled.
‘Wrth I’r llwch go setlo’ kicks off the album with a delicate acoustic arrangement mixing samples of miners’ wives recalling the dark truths about working in the mines with Jenkins’ lilting voice singing the album’s title track in Welsh. Jenkin’s lyricism stands out in the anthemic, upbeat “Built these towns on the crumbs of a breadline” is a sweeping, angry song about…

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Somewhere in his native South Carolina, the Oregon-based Cuchulain — who makes music under that mononym — met his someone special. Still fresh-faced and young, they stayed up late all summer, getting wasted to college radio: “Rolled in the grass in late July / we watched the dance of the fireflies,” Cuchulain sings over beach music bounce in “King Road,” continuing: “stuck our toes in among the reeds / August came and you led me.”
On his new album Window Seat, each song marks something warm from Cuchulain’s life, like a summer falling in love, a long and happy marriage, love of a child, and a good dog.
This folk-rocker is very specific in his songwriting, which can be risky. A good song strikes a delicate balance between the specific…

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Gold Dust rides a shambling psychedelic vibe in this third full-length, fully realizing the blend of folky jangle, twanging Americana and all-out guitar-spiraling freakery only hinted at in previous albums. The long, multi-parted “An Early Translation of a Later Work” juxtaposes stinging banjo cadences and soaring pop choruses, bass-bumping vamps and airy swirls of vocal counterpoints, as it rolls like a rainbow colored tide for over six minutes.
With his last album, The Late Great Gold Dust, Gold Dust’s Western Mass punker turned cosmic folk artist Stephen Pierce seemed to be trying to turn an ordinary guitar into a sitar, mining a western instrument for the slippery half tones of the psychedelic mainstay. Here in an ambitious…

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So Much I Still Don’t See is Sam Robbins’ third album after his debut, Finally Feeling Young (2021) and 2022’s Bigger Than in Between. It is melodic folk-pop in the style of James Taylor, Harry Chapin and, at times, Paul Simon that you immediately feel at home with. Robbins was originally from New Hampshire and used to go walking in the hills with his father who brought CDs by ’70s singer-songwriters like the ones mentioned above to listen to in their truck on the way there. This clearly had a powerful influence on the young Robbins that has lasted to this day.
The album was recorded in an old church in Springfield, Massachusetts, and is centred on Robbins’ delightful finger-picking acoustic guitar and beautifully clear vocals. Produced by…

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In true folk-rock style, the origins of Rising of the Bold can be traced to a long weekend in a country house in Shropshire-where the 8 Merry Hell members converged, allowing our five writers to share their latest offerings. These were worked into a band format, inspired by open fires and free-flowing ideas; fine food, foaming ales, Welsh whisky and good company.
The results are fabulous: classic folk-rock with an upbeat, uplifting feel-songs with serious subjects and a sense of humour. We open with an invitation to dance if you’re feeling down. There’s a dark, minor-key jig, cascading fiddle, bright pop joyfulness and voices joined together in harmony-plus an instrumental composed by Simon Swarbrick when he was left alone for several hours…

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Thee Holy Brothers is a supergroup of sorts, formed of Willie Aron and Marvin Etzioni, whose full CVs would take up this entire review. Etzioni writes the songs for their second project, whose title comes from his elation at the all-clear after a bout with cancer, a disease, wretchedly, Aron lost his wife to.
The presence of a pedal steel on ‘I Am Time’ adds suitable melancholy to a lyric that includes the line “everybody wants more of me”, which is even more stark given what Etzioni went through. ‘I Can See Through My Window Now’, complete with a small horn section, is a jubilant pastiche of about three eras of the Beatles’ catalogue. The duo invites you to play Spot The Influence, given that Etzioni’s cancer is a bitter pill that needs some sugar to accompany its digestion.

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After parting with Warner Bros., their label of nearly a decade, Seattle folk-rock stalwarts the Head and the Heart made a conscious shift to revisit their indie roots. Their breakout success amid the wave of early-2010s indie folk bands led to a sonic transformation when they entered the major-label system. Greater exposure and bigger shows led to a bigger team and an inevitably slicker sound on albums like Signs of Light (2016) and Living Mirage (2019). It’s a common enough story for many successful bands, and one that often leads to a mid-career reconciliation.
Aperture is the Head and the Heart’s sixth studio album and marks the first time they’ve produced themselves since their Sub Pop debut back in 2011. The back-to-basics move is a cliché for…

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Kassi Valazza opens ‘Roll On’, a meditative country -tinged ballad from her third album, with a stark realisation: “I’ve made up my mind, I feel like I do”, she asserts over a slow-motion two-step rhythm and thick brushstrokes of pedal steel and fiddle. “And if I feel like I do, I’ll try moving on”.
Her voice is a high, sharp lilt that brings to mind Joan Baez or Carolyn Hester or other folk singers from the ’60s and ’70s, with a gentle vibrato and a gift for windswept phrasing. She sings like the breeze is scattering her syllables like leaves. “Roll On” is a break-up song – with a lover perhaps, but more likely with a city – but she instills the song not with resentment or sadness, but a precarious excitement for a new beginning.
From Newman Street is an album full of…

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In 2023, at age 73, film director Sally Potter released Pink Bikini, her singer/songwriter debut album. Its songs revolved around her growing up a young female activist and rebel in London during the 1960s. Potter is well known for composing and recording her own film scores — Orlando, The Tango Lesson, The Roads Not Taken among them — and her musical pedigree dates to the 1970s with Lindsay Cooper’s various groups including the Feminist Improvising Group.
Anatomy, from Bella Union, is a song cycle that charts “the passionate love, destructive human behaviours, spiritual longings, physical dependencies and rampant exploitation that make up our turbulent love affair with the planet we inhabit.” She enlisted Marta Salogni as…

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Even today, Japan remains a thriving capital of recorded music – and, in particular, physical media. In the 1970s, it wasn’t uncommon for top-tier American artists, from Andy Williams to The Supremes, to record live albums exclusively for the Japanese market. Among those artists was Yusuf, a.k.a. Cat Stevens, whose 1974’s Saturnight: Live from Tokyo was the singer-songwriter’s first concert LP. Now, following its reissue last November as part of Record Store Day’s Black Friday event, Saturnight is coming to wide-release vinyl, CD, and digital/streaming on May 2 from UMe and Cat-o-Log Records.
Recorded at Nakano’s Sun Plaza Hall on June 22, 1974, the album chronicled Stevens’ Bamboozle World Tour.

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