It is almost 10 years that the trio of Adrian Blake Enscoe, Sydney Shepherd, and Regina Strayhorn, known to those that have already caught up with them as Bandits On the Run, have been operating, with a slew of independent releases.
Judging by the sound of those the New York trio should have already made quite a name for themselves, and maybe Rough Magic, will do that for them.
Not only is their take on the folk pop/rock combination one of the more inventive at the moment, but their concept of rotating lead vocals and rotating instruments is not a gimmick but serves the full purpose of their music and has both sense and purpose.
You can hear vast musical knowledge oozing…
Category: folk
Congratulations, the new album from songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Jacob Ungerleider, is the result of the casual playing of his demo tracks in the home of musicians Jenn Wasner and Alan Good Parker. Wasner, a member of Flock of Dimes and Wye Oak, kept asking Parker who was singing those songs on their Los Angeles stereo, and it turned out Parker was playing demos by the Virginia-based pianist he had met when they were touring with Natalie Prass. Ungerleider had recently moved to Los Angeles, and Wasner, who fell in love with these tracks, vowed to help Ungerleider put these songs together for an album.
In addition to co-producing Congratulations with Ungerleider, Wasner also sings and plays a variety of instruments on the record, as do…
Cherry Red Records compilation album A World of Our Own is a colossal release for one with such a finite scope. Comprising three discs and 86 tracks, it covers, as its subtitle suggests, The UK and Irish Folk Explosion of 1965 with maximalist gusto. This breadth is not the result of curatorial indecision but rather commemorates a singular slice of space and time, marked by an abundance of creativity and celebrating a gamut of interpretations of musical tradition.
Such a kaleidoscopic array exemplifies the core populist values that generally underpinned the folk revival movements of the mid-20th century. So, too, do the individual cuts selected to represent the metaphorical explosion at the album’s center. What emerges from it all is a well-fleshed-out…
The late singer-songwriter revisits his roots on this 2010 set-his first unedited concert recording-from the Chicago venue where he got his start as a young musician.
When John Prine was 14 or 15 his brother Dave took him down to the Old Town School of Folk Music. John’s problem, his brother figured, was a lack of direction. He was interested in gymnastics and art but otherwise just hung around the pool hall. Little by little, Dave was getting him into folk music, teaching him a few chords and playing him Carter Family records. In the early ’60s, the Old Town School was located in a ramshackle storefront on Chicago’s North Avenue, but it had already hosted legends like Pete Seeger, Mahalia Jackson, and Big Bill Broonzy.
If there were prizes for song titles, Benny Bleu would be a Grammy winner. Reflecting his day job as a geologist, in addition to the title-track we also get the likes of ‘March of the Mollusk’ and ‘Fairy Shrimp’. They form a concept album of original songs, fitting covers and meditative instrumentals about a changing planet and how the Anthropocene age – defined by human impact – could end in a mass extinction of our own making. Playing clawhammer banjo augmented by Jake Blount sideman Gus Tritsch on fiddle, guitar and mandolin, and an old-timey, swinging rhythm section, he not only warns of the man-made pressures driving climate change but also suggests we might yet find salvation in living simpler, more grounded lives. Bleu apparently spent ten years…
Were the Watchtowers is the final recorded work of the Sadies singer-guitarist Dallas Good, completed before his unexpected passing in February 2022. It’s jointly credited to Good and Richard Reed Parry (of Arcade Fire).
…The 9-song album features guest appearances from Margaret Atwood and Neko Case, while other contributors include Kurt Vile, Yo La Tengo, Jim Jarmusch, John Doe, Jon Spencer, Scott McCaughey and Gary Louris. Closing cut “Not in the World” features the aforementioned fan choir, with more than 500 contributors.
…Parry explained that Were the Watchtowers was written and recorded over the course of a decade, and further explores the “cosmic, psychedelic Americana sounds” heard when Parry…
Back in the mid-’60s, when Vanguard Records were all the rage on the folk scene, it was practically an honour to get a chance to record a solo folk/singer-songwriter album where it was just the artist, her/his voice, songs and a single instrument or two.
These days such albums have become a sort of rare occasion, with the artist being too courageous or truly able with something to say to attempt something like that. Essentially, you would really have to be a good musical storyteller to pull it off and come up with a consistent, substantial album of pure solo music.
After 10 years of complete silence, folk artist Shannon Jae Ridout is attempting something like that with her new album Two Busted…
This three-disc package from Edsel combines Labi Siffre’s self-titled debut (1970) and The Singer and the Song (1971) with a disc of additional contemporaneous material. At the time of the set’s release, the still-active British singer/songwriter was in the midst of a commercial upswing with film, television, and ad placements, as well as social media, introducing his underexposed and underappreciated early work to a new generation of listeners. (All of this occurring two decades after Siffre’s songs were sampled for tracks by Jay-Z, Eminem, and Kanye West, among others.) Edsel originally expanded and reissued these two albums separately in 2015, and in 2020 made the discs part of the comprehensive nine-disc box My Song. For the box, two post-1971 B-sides…
Americana artist Jenny Reynolds understands what it is like to have too much time on one’s hands yet not enough time to get the things that really need to be done. She will sit aimlessly and listen to the rain on one cut, then bemoan having to wait for the next. That situation resembles what often goes on in our own lives. The particulars may be different, but the paradoxical psychic pain is the same. We want to be able to be still and simultaneously keep on moving, which causes anxiety. Reynold’s lyrics wryly address our existential challenges with a nod to love as the redeemer.
The 11 story songs on Willow & Stone keep things simple. It is mostly with Reynold’s on acoustic guitar (sometimes electric), accompanied by small combos of instrumentalists on…
If every picture tells a story, then perhaps the album cover for The Hanging Stars‘ latest release, Just a Day, is perhaps something of a statement of intent because it features a simple photo of the four current band members standing against a dusty cornflower blue backdrop.
A line-up change at the end of 2024 resulted in a more stripped down version of the band with a quartet of Richard Olson (vocals and guitar), Patrick Ralla (guitar), Paul Milne (bass) and Paulie Cobra (drums) – this being his last recording before a prolonged sabbatical, his live replacement for live tours being Charlie Salvidge who has played previously with the bands TOY, Proper Ornaments, and Great Silkie.
Their sixth proper release in ten years – their…
Tucker Zimmerman‘s final studio album, Dream Me a Dream was completed in 2025 as a collaboration between Zimmerman and Big Potato’s own producer Nick Holton, and was due to be announced when news came of the deaths of Tucker and his wife Marie-Claire at their Liège home. After careful consideration, the label decided to go ahead. “Well, because that’s what Tucker was expecting,” they wrote.
…At 84, Zimmerman was not young, and had decades of sporadically released, underheard music behind him, starting with his Tony Visconti-produced 1968 debut, Ten Songs (which David Bowie listed in Vanity Fair in 2003 as an all-time favourite). Zimmerman’s career never flew but he released some superb singer-songwriter…
It’s always good to see young guitarists coming through and flying the flag for acoustic instrumental music. Miami-based 21-year-old instrumentalist Conor Moore spent time studying jazz but has seemingly found his nook in the American primitive style guitar genre.
Chamber Music is very much a solo effort and has been recorded with the minimum of fuss and frills; there is a pleasing simplicity to this approach, and it leaves Conor nowhere to hide. Thankfully, he’s good for it, with a pretty solid technique and plenty of creativity. That’s not to say the performances are perfect; the rhythm wavers here and there, and Conor is clearly still carving out his own style, but it’s all charming stuff. The cover of Ali Farka Touré’s and Toumani Diabaté’s…
…Alex Amen, at 26 years old, appears like a fresh-faced 1970s James Taylor. He is described by his record label ATO as “an artist untethered from time and place”. Growing up on the Gulf Coast of Texas, he moved to California to attend film school, before dropping out to join a commune. He then spent three and a half years on Vashon, an island in Washington State’s Puget Sound, living an outdoorsy, back-to-nature lifestyle that weighs heavily in his music. As he absorbed his environment and honed his musical skills, he released his first batch of solo recordings, The Zorthian Tapes, in 2024. He now lives between Texas, California and New York, and Sun of Amen is his first full-length album.
‘Diamonds’, the first track, is described as…
On their seventh studio album, These Are the Days That Turn in to Years, Pharis & Jason Romero, following 2022’s Tell ‘Em You Were Gold, channel four years of living, touring, parenting, and banjo-building into their most open-hearted set yet. Tracked in their riverside Horsefly barn, the album feels lived-in and luminous, rich with the stories and small revelations that define their world. This time around, the music launches with a thick bass spine that is impossible not to tap your foot to, as ‘Big Time World’ dances the album into life with an amiable fiddle swing for decorative delight, giving the sense of song being sung with skips, sways and carefree abandonment. ‘Last Cal’l is bedded into a swampy, muddy banjo texture. That bass and fiddle are essential once more on…
A superstar of Tzadik’s Radical Jewish Culture and the mastermind of the popular band Pharaoh’s Daughter, Basya Schechter returns with her greatest work yet, a gorgeous and sensual musical setting of the Biblical “Song of Songs.” Sung in Hebrew, English, Yiddish, Arabic, Spanish, and French, Basya has put her heart and soul into this project and it is evident in every song, solo, and arrangement. Eighteen years in the making, this is a towering achievement by one of the most passionate, sincere, and creative musicians in Jewish music today. Songs of Desire is an utter delight!“
Pharaoh’s Daughter is a genre-bending “world folk-rock” 8 piece ensemble led by vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Basya Schechter. Formed in 1995, the band merges Hasidic chants…
The polarizing songs of contemporary troubadour Jesse Welles have always been stubbornly present and blunt. His prolific nature has seen the release of many loose singles and celebrated LPs, landing Welles Grammy nods and placing him amongst some of the more talked-about figures in modern folk. At a time when folk music, in a popular sense, was beginning to sound formulaic, Welles’s scorching political takes and dedication to the mysterious songwriters that came before him quickly separated him from a burgeoning scene. Not that Welles’s music is some innovative leap, but it has become the center point of controversy within folk music for some years now, and the artist seems hellbent on getting his point across, uploading acoustic vignettes to…
The imagery New Mexico banjoist Johnny Bell throws up on his first fully composed solo banjo album, Mountain States, is often along the lines of slow-moving, sun-scorched skylines, or a scorpion in a desert with its tail quivering. There is an element of unease and an underlying gravity running through this music that is a far cry from a more ambient style of country banjo music, like that of Andrew Tuttle’s Fleeting Adventure, for example; something also reflected in the album artwork in which Daniel McCoy Jr. (Muscogee Creek/Potawatomi) renders New Mexico’s Diablo Canyon in surreal, psychedelic colour, a landscape at once familiar and alien.
A chunk of this is down to co-producer Andrew Weathers’ direction and decision to mic…
…Originally shelved by his label in 2001, this 21-track record has finally seen an official release.
The Suicide Handbook is Ryan Adams’ most elusive and mythic recordings. The album is a raw and intimate collection of songs that captures the songwriter at his most unguarded. Recorded at the beginning of his solo career and long circulating only through bootlegs, the album has earned a legendary status among die-hard fans and fans of the Americana genre alike for its stark stripped-back beauty.
Acoustic arrangements and hushed, late-night vocals, these songs feel like private confessions set to tape. Adams leans into themes of heartbreak, isolation, and emotional vulnerability, delivering recordings that are as fragile…
…In addition to a new remaster of the original album, this edition includes 13 previously unissued bonus tracks including demos, alternate takes, and outtakes from the album sessions.
After The Beau Brummels dissolved in 1968 following their swan song, Bradley’s Barn, it was doubtful that we’d ever hear from the band again, despite their individual and collective brilliance. The group did somehow reunite in 1975, however, for this fine and somewhat understated album. The band’s weaving of folk, country, and pop stylings hadn’t really changed that much from their prime in the mid- to late ’60s.
Ron Elliot has several superb songs on here, notably “Tennessee Walker” and the excellent album closer, “Today by Day,” which is sung by…
Heretics & Heritage is the fourth album from Leeds-based Lewis Pugh, combining both bluegrass and traditional folk/roots influences. Pugh himself plays banjo, guitar, snare drum and double bass, in addition to lead vocals, and all but two songs are self-penned.
The album lineup includes two members of north-east bluegrass band The Often Herd, in Evan Davies on mandolin, and Niles Krieger on fiddle. The opening track, ‘Big Stone Lifter’, is an up-tempo bluegrass number, with pedal steel courtesy of Stephen Hicken Jr., an addition to the usual bluegrass lineup including the aforesaid mandolin, fiddle and banjo. Indeed, the pedal steel is a very effective addition to the sonic mix, providing a unifying thread through much of the album.