It’s been a significant year for chamber-pop band Winterpills. The Western Massachusetts quintet recently marked their 20th anniversary with a remixed reissue of their debut album — complete with a pair of bonus tracks — and now they’ve returned with This Is How We Dance, their eighth album and first release in nine years.
Across these 12 songs, the rich melodies, shimmering guitars, and evocative lyrics serve as a reminder that even after a long hiatus, Winterpills have lost none of their luster. In fact, they may sound better than ever. Philip Price, the band’s principal lyricist, can summon a mood with just a small turn of phrase, and when his voice intertwines with Flora Reed’s, their harmonies create the luminous core of the band’s sound.
Category: folk
Rebuilding is a poignant new film about recovery and resilience from American director Max Walker-Silverman and starring hot property Josh O’Connor as a stoic rancher looking to rebuild his life after a wildfire destroys his land. A quiet and sensitive picture, the makers decided the artist to bring its musical side to life was folklore forager and discerning composer Jake Xerxes Fussell, who in turn enlisted the services of producer and musician James Elkington to share the load.
This power couple have plenty of proof of their productivity, most recently with Jake’s lovely When I’m Called album, which James produced and played on, plus 2022’s Good and Green Again, with James in the chair again. For this project, the pair collaborated remotely until…
Sam Shackleton has been subtly proving himself to be the real deal in terms of traditional folk song interpretation. It takes a competent musician to do justice to songs that were made to be sung and passed through generations; it takes an exceptional talent to truly inhabit the songs and breathe fresh life into them, as Sam Shackleton does. He has been ploughing away on the margins for five years or so now, releasing a debut album under his own label in 2022 that earned kudos for the authenticity of his approach and the stylistic echoes of artists like Johnny Cash and Woody Guthrie. One look at the tone and templates of his releases reveals Sam to be a keen student of the early sixties’ folk revival; this is clearly a period wherein the attitude and approach to folk songs…
Couples who choose to record together will obviously bring a genuinely personal touch to songs they create, and Jonathan and Abigail Peyton have chosen for Jonathan’s third release to perform as a duo, and the results are magnificent. Their ability to write superb melodies and deliver captivating harmonies is highly impressive. The quality doesn’t diminish with this collection of songs, which are drawn from highly individualistic trauma and subsequent personal growth. Jason Hoard twiddled the knobs majestically, and the songs are all written by Peyton, with one written by Brian Elmquist (The Lone Bellow). The duo are backed up by Jason Hoard (guitars, banjo, bass, mandolin), Jonathan Ray (guitars), Kevin Carl (drums), Isaac George…
Normal Town is the third album from acclaimed Oxfordshire five-piece, The Dreaming Spires, and their first new music in nearly a decade. However, a decade-long hiatus from recording hasn’t dimmed the band’s love of rock ‘n’ roll romance with a record that has both nostalgia-fuelled anthems and reflective ballads on themes such as escape, alienation and atomisation – but where the redemptive power of music ultimately wins out.
The Dreaming Spires’ new album title has its origins in the neighbouring town of Didcot, where the band’s founding members and brothers, Joe and Robin Bennett, reside. A 2017 study found that Didcot closely matched the national median average for a range of different statistics, earning it the sobriquet “the most normal town…
Widely acclaimed British band The Levellers are celebrating the 30th anniversary of their chart hit album Zeitgeist. The Zeitgeist 30th Anniversary Collection will be released in November 2025 via Warner Music and is available as a 2LP and 3CD.
The aptly titled album ‘Zeitgeist’ cemented the Levellers’ position at the top of the UK music scene in 1995. Following their headline appearance at Glastonbury Festival that summer, ‘Zeitgeist’ stormed to the top of the charts upon its release in August, beating off competition from Blur and The Charlatans to become the sound of the summer alongside Supergrass, Oasis and Pulp.
Now, in 2025, Zeitgeist’s 30th year, the album has been gloriously remixed and remastered by Al Scott, the original producer who first sat down…
Sean Pratt is one of those artists who seems not to realise how good they really are. Spending just three days in the studio, he and Megan Seibe, Colin Duckworth and James Maakestad recorded the nine songs that make up Prairie Whistle Call live in the studio. The songs were new and fresh, and their approach captured a purity that often gets lost in all the gloss and multi-tracking that make up so much of modern recording. With no bells and whistles to get in the way, you get a recording of remarkable honesty. Guitars ring true, the bass provides a gentle beat, while the violin almost cries with its lonesome quality.
Pratt has found a stream where the music bends to traditional sounds, yet his lyrics are often less so; these tunes could have been written…
Terry Klein’s fifth studio album, Hill Country Folk Music, offers a moving meditation on aging and memory in intimate and environmental terms. He knows he’s getting older. Youth has passed him by, and the natural world has become a less lovely place, but he’s not old yet, just older, and the despoiled ecology still has its charms. He’s a man in the middle who can’t help but chuckle at his fate. We are going to die someday, and maybe we are all doomed collectively.
Therefore, as he sings on the first and last cuts on the album, the least he can do is “Try” and “Try Again”. (It’s the same song sung differently.) Klein says he values the sound of the river and the stars in the sky. He knows life is more than just lying back and accepting the way…
The Cranberries performed on MTV’s Unplugged in 1995 in promotion for their sophomore album, ‘No Need to Argue’, but the audio has never been released, until now. Released in the full 9-song, 45-minute performance.
…Recorded at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with a string section during the promotion of No Need to Argue, the broadcast featured favorites from the new album (“Zombie,” “Ode to My Family”), the already-sterling “Linger,” a few songs that would appear on their next album, 1996’s To the Faithful Departed (“Free to Decide,” “I’m Still Remembering”), and the fan favorite “Yesterday’s Gone,” which never made any of their albums but was beloved enough to be licensed for inclusion on the last expansion of No Need to Argue.
Paul Kelly is 70 and has never been bigger. He has just headlined his first arena tour – which sold out. In an industry as ageist as Australian music, it’s a remarkable career trajectory; there’s been no sudden revival of interest, nor a belated rediscovery of his vast catalogue. Slowly, over a career spanning 50 years, Kelly has become ubiquitous.
Overfamiliarity comes at a price. There are people who have never listened to Kelly who appear to loudly resent his success. Much of the pushback seems to stem from the annual celebration of How to Make Gravy, Kelly’s Christmas perennial-from-prison. They never want to hear another word from Joe, the fuck-up who was already the subject of what is now probably Kelly’s second-most famous song, To Her Door.
Joelton Mayfield grew up living and breathing the Bible, through early youth aligning himself unquestioningly with the Christian fundamentalism of his native Texas. You can hear that familiarity and comfort in songs like “Jacob Dreamed a Ladder,” an earnest, entirely natural, slightly updated exploration of the story from the Book of Genesis. “And behold, the lord, as you’ve never seen before, driving down a highway of solid gold/the mover of the mountains bringing peace into the valley down below,” Mayfield croons, wobbling on the notes to give them extra emotional impact. Yet the slow rocking “Now,” hints at a widening perspective, quoting Wilco and the Mountain Goats, as Mayfield discovers the power of secular music. Crowd Pleaser is not about…
Extensive seven-CD box set following the career of English singer-songwriter Thea Gilmore. Covering her recordings from 2008 to 2015.
Released in 2008, ‘Liejacker’ was Thea Gilmore’s eighth album featuring contributions from Joan Baez, Dave McCabe, and Erin McKeown. Following in 2009 was Gilmore’s first live album, ‘Recorded Delivery’, with recordings taken from UK shows during 2006 and 2008, with the first half of the album being acoustic and the second half electric, with a full band.
Gilmore rounded out 2009 with the release of an album of winter-themed songs, ‘Strange Communion’, featuring eight originals penned by Gilmore with Nigel Stonier, as well as two cover versions – Yoko Ono’s ‘Listen, the Snow…
There is an intimacy to Lydia Luce’s third and latest LP, Mammoth, that feels almost invasive.
Across a dozen ethereal tracks, she touches on pain and relationships, eventual acceptance, and ultimately to contentment, all delivered over a lush soundtrack. Luce gets right into it with the opening title track — a slow-tempo, remarkably beautiful song about healing and self-discovery, punctuated by sweeping strings. Her vocals are delivered with an almost breathy and unhurried calmness that has you waiting for the next line.
The strings make sense here as Mammoth was produced with her longtime creative collaborator Jordan Lehning, who along with Luce (a session violinist) runs the Nashville-based string collective Lockeland Strings.
The first time we hear Bob Dylan on this fabulous 8CD, 165-track boxset, it’s Christmas Eve 1956. Dylan’s high school trio, The Jokers – Bob Zimmerman (vocals and piano), Larry Keegan and Howard Rutman (vocals) – are whomping through Shirley and Lee’s “Let the Good Times Roll” in a version recorded on a 78rpm acetate at the Terlinde Music Store in St Paul, a bus ride from the 15-year-old Dylan’s home in Hibbing, Minnesota.
It’s barely a minute long, not much more than a gloriously raucous din, but there distinctly is the young Bob, hollering his head off. The last time we hear him, it’s October 1963, at the end of his first headlining show at a sold-out Carnegie Hall, Dylan in full command of 3,000 hip New Yorkers who’ve just been profoundly wowed…
One day, will Saintseneca’s new record, Highwallow & Supermoon Songs, do for another worn-down, listless folk musician what painting did for bandleader Zac Little? Toward the end of the 2010s, Little suffered a prolonged period of creative doldrums, thus explaining the seven years or so it took his band to follow up Pillar of Na. Touring and recording and writing and practicing all take a toll; even artists need time to fill their cups, contrary to preconceptions that art is easy and those who make it their vocation are blessed with ever-flowing goblets. (This is very much not the case, for artists as well as for arts and culture critics. We all identify as “tired.”)
It fits that Little plugged into painting to recharge his spirit. Highwallow & Supermoon Songs…
…CD release featuring 5 bonus tracks.
For nearly three decades, Boston’s Dropkick Murphys have brought a rowdy, beery, joyously disreputable form of Celtic punk to the masses. When they arrived on the national scene in the late ’90s, the Murphys were one of many extremely fun niche bands on Rancid’s Hellcat imprint. But the Murphys toured hard and made irresistible ragers, and they eventually transcended their background, finding their way to audiences far outside their subculture. In 2005, for instance, they set some unused archival Woody Guthrie words to stomping, ominous, irresistible music. A year later, Martin Scorsese used “I’m Shipping Up to Boston,” the resulting song, in a couple of his scenes from his Oscar-winning Boston crime epic…
There’s a quiet hum of excitement about Merlyn Driver’s full-length debut, and with good reason. Since his first EP (This Is the Corner of a Larger Field, 2017), releases have been thin on the ground. His most notable project to date is the 2022 release Simmerdim: Curlew Sounds, a collaborative album curated and produced by Driver, featuring a vast array of talent from the world of folk music and beyond. It marked him out as one of the genre’s free thinkers, immersed in tradition yet willing to experiment, attuned to the ambience of the natural world yet always on hand with a winning melody.
That early EP saw Driver set out his stall as a kind of latter-day Nick Drake, where understated and sensitive songwriting went hand in hand…
Banjoists Steve Martin and Alison Brown have called up a boatload of friends to guest on their album. The list includes Jackson Browne, Vince Gill, the Indigo Girls, Tim O’Brien, Jason Mraz, and Della Mae. They open with a banjo duet, ‘Friend of Mine,’ which has a timeless quality to it. The instruments sparkle, and they mesh together so that in places it sounds like a single player.
From there, the album quickly goes off piste with songs like the Bossa Nova-influenced ‘Michael’, which features Aoife O’Donovan and Sarah Jarosz. ‘Dear Time’ with Jackson Browne and Jeff Hanna highlights Martin’s comment that “with the banjo, there are so many styles you can work with, but Alison and I both have an ear for its more melodic, melancholy aspect.”