Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats release their tenth anniversary of their breakout self-titled debut album through a very special vinyl reissue. The 10th anniversary edition offers fans an additional album’s worth of demo recordings. The album also offers fans a similarly special glimpse into the band’s creative origins.
“I had always loved the southern sounds of Soul from the Stax record catalog, and at the same time was listening to The Band and falling in love with their twangy approach to Rock’n’Roll. I wondered what it would sound like if Sam and Dave were in The Band.” – Nathaniel Rateliff
This monumental self-titled album in Rateliff’s career was the catalyst for a journey that has only gained momentum over the last decade.
Category: folk
Best known for the intricate guitar-work which guided the warm, woody folk-rock of her 2022 Grammy-winning album Revealer, Madison Cunningham opens her latest project Ace instead with swathes of rippling piano.
The instrument is the main protagonist across the record, pairing sweetly with the Californian musician’s crystal-clear vocals on tracks like lead single ‘My Full Name’, which recalls the intimate art-pop of Regina Spektor.
Elsewhere the album is more fluid and impressionistic, piano swirling restlessly amongst moody clarinet and strings. Songs shift like the weather, disintegrating into choppy rhythms and murky chords before cohering into choruses again, echoing Cunningham’s lyrical…
Should music academics ever require evidence as to how a singer-songwriter/musician matures and develops over a short period of time, then there could be no better artist to use as a case study than Katie Spencer. Leaving aside an impressive and increasingly formidable catalogue of live work, in respect of her recorded output alone, the journey, from the release of a highly praised debut album, Weather Beaten in 2019, followed by 2022’s The Edge of the Land, which reached Number 14 in the Official Folk Charts, to What Love Is, her third and latest stunning release, provides more than ample material to satisfy any of those abovementioned scholars.
Katie’s musical history has been well-documented, raised by music- loving parents in…
When you think of really top class female singer-songwriters named Williams, the name that does not so often get mentioned is Dar; and yet, she has a very tasty backlog of very good albums, 13 in total dating back to 1990, with a varied mixture of styles, songs with a wide variety of topic (many of them more than just very good) and all sung by one of the sweetest voices around. In addition she has written well-received books, largely drawn from her experiences as a touring artist over many years. In truth she not had the greatest commercial success, but if success is measured by the affection in which she is held by her significant fan base, and the popularity of her live shows, she is certainly successful. She is also highly regarded by some of her peers (and mentors like…
Léna Bartels made a terrific debut album, Preservation, in 2022. Now, after a split release with regular collaborator Nico Hedley (It’s Gonna Be a Wonderful New Year, released in February), she’s back with a new full-length album. It’s not a surprising departure or change of pace for the Brooklyn-via-Portland singer/songwriter; it does, however, build on that excellent debut.
Many of the same musicians appear on Bartels’ new record, The Brightest Silver Fish, particularly the core trio of Izzy Oram Brown on guitar, Micah Prussack (Youbet) on bass, and Andrew Emge (The Big Net) on drums (Bartels plays mostly guitar and keyboards). The songs are uniformly stellar, but the arrangements are also crucial, mainly because they contain a surprising amount of…
Earlier this year, nomadic Texan instrumentalist Jason Dungan, who operates out of Copenhagen under the moniker Blue Lake, released Weft, a beautiful, shimmering short album of finely textured, intricate instrumentals. Although the record is in itself a significant piece of work, Jason considered it an interim project of sorts, testing his ability as bandleader and promising a full-length album by the end of the year.
So here we have The Animal, an LP that fully embraces the community spirit of music and a band sound. Before Weft, Blue Lake releases have been more solitary endeavours, with only 2019’s The Parrot splitting a solo structure with a collaborative sound. This makes the thinking behind Weft clearer, and that process immediately…
Luv in the New World is the title of Canadian artist Joe Nolan’s new album, produced by Grammy Award winner Tyler Chester. Mostly recorded on tape live off the floor, there is an immediate rawness and warmth to the sound that adds extra weight to Nolan’s compositions, further enriched by an excellent group of accompanying musicians. The lineup might change from one song to another, but Nolan’s perfectly controlled voice remains as one of the album’s key elements.
The record kicks off with ‘Wake Up Sleepy Anna’, a smooth yet poignant track that was released as the album’s lead single. The lyrics tell the story of Anna, a fictional character who serves as a symbol for hope in uncertain times. It’s a wake-up call in which an optimistic attitude is…
The Lone Canary are Jesse Fox and Heather Camacho, an americana duo from Rockford, Illinois, known for crafting songs that feel worn-in and weathered. Their third album, Dime Store Horses, is a meditation on grief, memory, and resilience. It doesn’t shout; it murmurs, aches, and ultimately endures.
The album opens with ‘Kingdom Come,’ where swirling strings and organ evoke a dust storm rolling in. The lyrics reflect on youthful ideals and spiritual reckoning. “Say a prayer for wayward sons, marching onward to kingdom come.” It sets the tone for an album that’s more confessional than performative. ‘Sins of Our Fathers’ questions whether we can ever escape the weight of inheritance. “Why even bother, when…
Craft Recordings commemorates the 60th anniversary of Joan Baez’s bestselling sixth studio album, Farewell, Angelina, with its first wide vinyl reissue in nearly four decades. A pivotal release in Baez’s catalog, the album blends traditional folk standards with contemporary covers, marking a notable stylistic evolution-including the singer-songwriter’s first use of electric guitar.
Set for release on October 3rd, Farewell, Angelina returns with all-analog mastering by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio and is pressed on 180-gram vinyl (via Fidelity Record Pressing). An old-school style tip-on jacket, meanwhile, replicates the LP’s original cover. Singer, songwriter and activist Joan Baez (b.1941) is one of modern music’s most influential and enduring voices…
This album is the full award-winning Edinburgh Fringe live show recorded at the Jazz Bar. Running to almost an hour, it includes all the chat and banter and all the jokes. The other CD and the LP focus on the music with a couple of bootlegs involved, but this is the core live show.
58 Fordwych Road (Flat 5) was the home of Roy and Mocy Harper in swingin’ 60s London. It was an open house for many a waif and stray and a hang out for budding musicians of the day. They would come round and play games and swap songs and spliffs. What they learnt from each other – at the start of their own voyages of discovery – led to so many treasures. When I think about this I realise that for such a humble little two room home, it had an outsize impact on the music scene in London…
“Forest and the Shore” by Keith Christmas is remarkable. In his essay for Gather in the Mushrooms, compiler, author and Saint Etienne member Bob Stanley says it is “as evocative as its title. The song has a deeply wooded sound, like a cross between Serge Gainsbourg’s “Ballade de Melody Nelson” and Ralph Vaughan Williams.” To this can be added the brooding, dramatic melancholy of Scott Walker’s “The Seventh Seal.”
Despite the grandeur of “Forest and the Shore” – and the astounding Richard Thompson-esque, Tom Verlaine-predicting guitar solo taking it to its close – Gather in the Mushrooms: The British Folk Underground 1969-1975 is ostensibly an 18-track collection of British folk recordings. Or, more accurately, folk-rooted or…
For decades, Sir Richard Bishop has been a formidable force in the world of experimental guitar music. From his foundational work with the Sun City Girls to his extensive and eclectic solo career, he has consistently defied categorisation, drawing from a global well of musical traditions to create something uniquely his own. His most recent offering, 2020’s Oneiric Formulary, continued this exploration of a “spirited polytheistic” approach to the guitar; described in these pages as “a roller-coaster of a success” and a “beautiful and brilliant riot of a record.”
Now, with Hillbilly Ragas, Bishop turns his gaze inwards, towards the heart of American folk traditions, only to shatter them and rebuild them in his own image.
Birthed via a Black Country communion which saw Robert Plant and his new, largely unknown bandmates enjoy a lengthy courtship off-radar, Saving Grace feels guileless, almost serendipitous.
What might happen, Plant mused, if he shipped what he’d learned from T Bone Burnett, Alison Krauss et al home and duetted on choice blues, alt-country and folk covers with Brum-born former music teacher, Suzi Dian? Across 10 intimate songs deftly ornamented by guitarists Matt Worley and Tony Kelsey and cellist Barney Morse-Brown, magic happens.
As much avuncular vibe-master as Golden God, Plant cedes some lead vocal terrain to Dian (‘Too Far from You’) and Worley (Blind Willie Johnson’s ‘Soul of a Man’) while bringing…
Returning to the dawn of his career in Manhattan’s crucible of folk, poetry and politics, MOJO explores Dylan’s transformation from wannabe to real deal with the friends and peers who watched it happen.
MOJO CD, The Complete Unknowns , documents a tight-knit scene of uncommon talents – Judy Collins, Phil Ochs, Dave Van Ronk, Mimi & Richard Fariña, Fred Neil, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Woody Guthrie, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Mimi & Richard Farina, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, Eric Andersen, Carolyn Hester, Odetta and more, as well as Dylan himself – inspiring each other to find new paths into and out of American musical tradition.
It takes a Village to raise a child, goes the old saying; here’s the one that nurtured Bob Dylan so well.
Named for a street in Birmingham, the site of Swordfish Records and where the teenage Jon Wilks would busk, while not rooted in his hometown, Needless Alley is formed from his musical influences of the time, among them Paul Simon, Pentangle, Nick Drake and Bob Dylan, whose Highway 61 Revisited sparked the idea of what might happen on the titular thoroughfare. Described as a patchwork of memories and marking a more autobiographical approach to his writing after previous trad folk-inclined material, he’s backed by his regular Grizzly Folk cohort of Jon Nice (keyboards, guitars), Rich Davies (bass) and Laurence Hunt (drums) with Albert Hansell on melodeon.
Jackie Oates and Joe Sartin on backing vocals,…
Trapper Schoepp’s seventh LP Osborne borrows its name from a unit at the Betty Ford clinic – a place where the Wisconsin musician ended up after a decade of dependence on prescription pain meds. Just one month after being released from the legendary treatment facility, a clean and revived Schoepp was in the basement of a California church recording this record.
To call it personal almost feels like an under- statement. Though the music is often upbeat, the lyrics reveal a much darker narrative. He confronts his addiction head-on with the opening track, “Loaded.” This mid-tempo indie-pop song, with its infectious chorus, traces the roots of his struggle: a pain management doctor who not only prescribed the pills but even provided advance…
There’s a thought that it’s simple enough (relatively speaking) to write your first album – you’ve got a lifetime’s worth of experiences to hone into ten or so songs. The second album, though – that’s tougher. Unless you’re the duo of singer-songwriters that compose Texas band Briscoe. Philip Lupton and Truett Heintzelman released their first album, West Of It All, in 2023. Between now and then, they finished college, started their first large-scale tour, AND married their long-time partners. All of that change and travel informed their new record, Heat of July. It finds the pair using a larger sonic paint box to help explore all they’ve seen in the past two years.
The deepest wells in that paint box comes via producer Brad Cook, who seemingly…
Joan Shelley follows her acclaimed 2022 album The Spur with Real Warmth, her seventh full-length release. Recorded in Toronto with producer Ben Whiteley and features contributions from the Weather Station’s Tamara Lindeman, Doug Paisley, Nathan Salsburg, Matt Kelley, Ken Whiteley, drummer Philippe Melanson, and saxophonist Karen Ng.
“Every emotion in one small hour,” sings Joan Shelley, observing her young daughter Talya on ‘Field Guide to Wild Life’. “A raging ocean, a meteor shower.” The folk-adjacent auteur’s ninth studio LP is alive, Natalie Merchant-style, to the marvels of creation, but also the vulnerability that comes with suddenly having a physical stake in the future of humanity.
While The Third Mind may be a supergroup-the band consists of Grammy-winning singer/songwriter/guitarist Dave Alvin (The Blasters), bassist Victor Krummenacher (Camper Van Beethoven, Cracker), drummer Michael Jerome (Richard Thompson, John Cale), guitarist David Immergluck (Counting Crows, John Hiatt), and singer/songwriter Jesse Sykes-the quintet’s mesmerizing new album, Right Now!, is as ego-less a record as you’ll find. Captured over four days in LA, the collection is a masterclass in being present, in letting go of control and embracing the thrill of collaboration. The recordings represent a singular moment-completely unscripted, completely unrehearsed-and the performances are as unpredictable as they are engrossing…
Primed by London Calling for the reluctant genre to open itself up to its place in the grand rock’n’roll lineage, the 1980s opened it up to folk traditions and fantastical lyricism, while punk opened up traditional music to the delight of slurred singing and unthinkable abrasions.
This was the time when Kathleen Brennan implored Tom Waits to dig a much deeper hole in Captain Beefheart’s quarry and Nick Cave to magnify the gothic elements of “Long Black Veil” and “Hey Joe” rather than the tunes. The richness of roughness was revitalizing tradition, and this trick still very much works; just check Lankum’s 2023 thrill-horror version of “Go Dig My Grave.” The rowdy speeds of traditional Irish folk and blistering punk proved to be indistinguishable from each…