Their first release in over 14 years, Forever, I’ve Been Being Born, finds Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter dealing with life, death, change, and renewal as the Seattle-based outfit’s fragile cosmic folk music drifts into the ether.
The band’s core, vocalist Sykes and guitarist Phil Wandscher, needed time to regroup and find inspiration after losing their rhythm section following 2011’s Marble Son. The new album is softer with layers of strings and light percussion around Sykes’ lyrics of crumbling and rebuilding. The pattern throughout the record is to start soft with minimal support to Sykes’ enchanting vocals, then increase the sound by adding multiple strings, chimes, and fuzzy electric guitar to close.
Their ethereal, floating sound begins with…
Category: folk
1. Alan Sparhawk – Not Broken
2. BC Camplight – Where You Taking My Baby?
3. Matt Berninger – Bonnet of Pins
4. Peggy Seeger – Slow
5. Steve Queralt – Swiss Air (feat. Emma Anderson)
6. Nathan Salsburg – Ipsa Corpora (Excerpt)
7. Poor Creature – The Whole Town Knows
8. Natalie Bergman – Dance
9. Holden & Zimpel – Incredible Bliss
10. Witch – Dancer On a Trip
11. S.G. Goodman – Snapping Turtle
12. The Wildmans – Sometimes
13. Faun Fables – Widdershins
14. Tropical Fuck Storm – Teeth Marche
15. North Mississippi Allstars – Preachin’ Blues
Deviate may be the debut album from Oxford-based indie Americana band Steady Habits, but it comes on the back of a burgeoning reputation based on festival appearances, supporting the likes of Danny George Wilson and the odd single release following the band’s 2020 EP Hold in Your Breath. Frontman Sean Duggan hails from New England and the album is shaped by both this physical and emotional journey. It is a journey shaped by Duggan’s memories of home, family and his queer experiences.
The title track is a love letter to his younger self and to those growing up in a world that seems, in Duggan’s eyes, to be eroding freedoms of expression. “The LGBTQ+ community have long been labelled as deviants. This song…
Atmosphere is the third album from North Carolina-based singer/songwriter Alexa Rose, with ten songs partly shaped by the devastation heaped on her community by Hurricane Helene. It’s not the first time Rose has conjured aching beauty out of the most trying of times – after all, her previous album, Headwaters, was written during the pandemic – but Hurricane Helene had a far more direct impact on this album.
Born in the Alleghany Highlands of Western Virginia, Alexa Rose was raised in the tiny railroad town of Clifton Forge. She moved in 2013 to study music at Appalachian State University, and she continues to be based in North Carolina. After graduating in 2016, she took to the road with her own songs, and she’s been touring…
…features the complete original record remastered by David Grisman, plus outtakes and alternate versions (including two previously unreleased tracks) from Dawg’s vault.
The second full-length collaborative effort between Jerry Garcia (guitar/vocals) and David Grisman (mandolin, mando-cello, tenor banjo, vocals) is arguably their most endearing as well. Just as its title suggests, Not for Kids Only (1993) is an album of folkie standards and traditional tunes that is — as Grisman so eloquently depicts in his liner notes — “our answer to ‘Barney.'”
The material chosen is comprised of songs they had undoubtedly encountered at one time or another during their respective careers, both of which were deeply rooted in…
‘Aqualung Live’ is a recording of Jethro Tull performing their classic album ‘Aqualung’ in full, originally released in 2005 and now newly remastered.
Each era of rock music has had its own craftily marketed phenomenon — it was the “live album” in the ’70s, “unplugged” recordings in the ’90s, and since the late ’80s through the present day, the “tribute album.” But the early 21st century saw another addition — veteran bands revisiting classic albums and performing them in their entirety. Jethro Tull’s most enduring release is largely agreed to be 1971’s classic Aqualung, and in late 2004 Ian Anderson, Martin Barre, and their latest Tull mates dusted off the album once more in front of a small audience for XM Radio’s…
With continual creativity and finesse Acoustic Hot Tuna sets out touring across the United States July, August and September. Masters in their field, Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady’s joy in playing unfiltered riffs, swapping notes and smiles, has delighted them and thrilled their audiences for seven decades!
Hot Tuna has brought a wealth of emotions to their music through deep perceptions and tremendous talent. Members of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Grammy recipients, they are always injecting fresh energy into their sound with constant improvisation taking their musical horizons further. Every note is a unique expression of that very moment.
Jorma enthuses, “Focus on the things you love, listen with an open heart, and the music will…
Courtney Hartman’s previous album, 2021’s Glade, was very much a solitary affair – Hartman recorded the bulk of it alone as she lived in a barn on the property of her childhood Colorado home – but with her new album, the appropriately titled With You, she reached out to those around her and created an album written, funded and recorded with her friends, fans and collaborators. The album documents a huge shift in Hartman’s life, too: becoming a mother for the first time.
Her journey to motherhood and beyond looms large over the album, beginning at the opening track ‘Softening’. “All of the edges now are softening / See the light almost standing still / For you,” Hartman opens, her voice barely more than a whisper, backed by an ethereal…
Michael McGovern returns with his second album, following on from Highfield Suite, a near-solo effort recorded in lockdown, Nebraska– style from his bedroom. Trailed as a folk album, however broad that church may be, it doesn’t quite prepare you for the breadth of sound on The Thin White Road. Featuring a full band, saxophones and choirs, it’s a sound which is often full on.
Press releases reference artists as diverse as Laura Marling, Leonard Cohen, Fleet Foxes and Crazy Horse. You could add to that the rush of the E Street Band at times when the full rainbow of musicians kicks on, particularly on the opening title track.
With a strong storytelling theme throughout, McGovern picks up the stories of wandering…
Following the release of his seventh studio album A Modern Day Distraction last year, Jake Bugg is back with a very special deluxe repack of the celebrated record. Following the release of the first single Never Said Goodbye Jake releases Oblivious previously unreleased and written during the spring 0f 2025 it’s an up tempo celebratory slice of British guitar pop which resonates perfectly for the sound of our post Oasis summer. British guitar music has never sounded so good. Jake headlined packed out UK dates across the summer and will be doing instores to support the album, whilst also headlining the RadioX event on Oct 3rd 13 years and seven albums into his career, A Modern Day Distraction cements Jake as one of the UK’s most established and enduring songwriters in the UK.
The Beggar had its genesis as a collection of “quite rough and raw” demo recordings, released in 2018 on Bandcamp. Robin Adams then saw how the songs evolved in a live setting when played by a band and decided to revisit and re-record the songs with a group of musician friends.
He has had no funding for the record, and so it “was a labour of love from everyone involved who dedicated their precious time and talent to these recordings”.
At the time of the initial recording, Adams had been recovering from a very difficult four-year period of chronic disease, which had left him housebound and isolated. He was “unable to gig, see friends, or to socialise in any meaningful way due to debilitating fatigue”.
Detroit-based Ethan Daniel Davidson is nothing if not prolific. Lear is Davidson’s 14th studio album and, even more impressively, his second of 2025. If that earlier album, Cordelia, helped reinforce a reputation as a reflective songwriter, then Lear, which emerged from those same sessions, can be assumed to be a companion piece.
The album has been compared to Neil Young’s On the Beach insofar as it is dripping in melancholy and ache. In its tone and tempo, it hints that Cohen wouldn’t be so far wide of the mark either. Davidson is mining the dark corners of his own psyche here, and it shows. His songs have become more autobiographical, and opening track ‘Stop Breaking Down’ has Davidson reflecting on a hitchhiking youth, of bad…
All That Remains is a collection of live performances captured on the road, live and in living color.
Austin, Texas roots rockers the Band of Heathens play music that filters contemporary singer/songwriter and alt-country flavors through the guiding influence of dusty 1970s soft rock. Founded by three songwriters, the group specialize in tales with a distinct Southern flavor and characters with a taste for misadventure, buoyed by tasteful arrangements and harmonies.
Formed in Austin, the Band of Heathens became a group totally by accident. Songwriters Colin Brooks, Gordy Quist, and Ed Jurdi were all doing regular sets at Momo’s in Austin when they began sitting in with each other, eventually making the whole…
It’s been more than two years since Jethro Tull released an expanded version of “The Broadsword And The Beast” before letting their reissue programme stumble chronologically, with unexpected emergence of “Bursting Out” box set followed by the “Christmas Album” and “Living In The Past” repackages. All this means another go at 1984’s “Under Wraps” is long overdue, yet it might be closer than everyone thinks, or farther, depending on what a fans’ take on the band’s digital-only offering of a concert from that platter’s promotional tour will be.
Restricted to streaming, Live In Berlin 1985 may seem strange, as it doesn’t contain a single cut from the group’s then-latest record, but the special performance – featuring the temporarily…
…Featuring 4 additional tracks (‘Sweet Thames Flow Softly’, ‘Yellow Triangle’, ‘Music to Our Ears’, ‘Butterfly’) and a re-imaged version of the track ‘The Big Marquee’ which featured on the original album.
The title, borrowed from WB Yeats’s poem Easter 1916, and the cover, a landscape with an ominous fiery glow in the distance, suggest a confrontational, political record.
There is indeed some score settling on the 25th studio album from a singer who, at 79, remains one of Ireland’s national treasures, but Christy Moore has ever been a nuanced artist, offering the full emotional gamut in the songs he writes and curates. Humour, rage, empathy, sorrow and joy roll seamlessly into each other, united…
Dispensing with his trademark banjo at the suggestion of producer Afie Jurvanen and, by extension, his Appalachian-rooted sound, Nova Scotia’s Old Man Luedecke’s latest, She Told Me Where to Go, finds him exploring different musical textures on songs that capture the darkness and light of reaching your mid-life years, a point where he’d considered giving up music and had taken a job as a deckhand on a scallop boat.
The change is evident in the opening title track, a country blues with a steady drum beat and bottleneck guitar about following fate (“I do not hurry/And I do not rush/I don’t waste no effort/On what don’t mean much/She told me where to go …so I look for Chaos/And I look for signs”). A lighter acoustic shuffle, Guy Fieri is a playful…
David Morris of Red River Dialect has always been able to find the spiritual in ordinary objects. It’s a reflection, perhaps, of his training as a Buddhist monk — a habit of contemplation and co-existence with all the inhabitants of the world around him. On Basic Country Mustard, his most successful songs focus not on nature’s myriad wonders, but on what makes us human.
Consider, for instance, the title track, an extended meditation on the most plebian of condiments. Against a jangling guitar, a bouncy drum beat, and scattered piano chords, Morris observes the simplicity — just two ingredients: seeds and liquid — and the infinite variations of mustard. “The Ancient Chinese back in 1000 B.C./ The Romans and Japanese/ They all liked…
Sister Irene O’Connor didn’t want her convent to know what she was up to. She had moved from Australia to Singapore in the 1950s to work with children, buying a guitar to play them her original songs. In 1965, a parent of one of the children invited her to record at a radio station and soon she had a recording contract with Philips. O’Connor released several EPs and a compilation in the late ‘60s, but to keep her burgeoning recording career a secret, she used the pseudonym Myriam Frances. “Nuns didn’t do that kind of thing,” she later explained.
In Singapore, O’Connor met Sister Marimil Lobregat, an audio technician interested in early electronic instruments. They ran into one another by chance a decade later in Sydney…