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…
Category: folk
The latest project from Andrea Nicole King is an LP named Harvest Love, a record that seeks to ‘honour grief honestly and authentically’. To call Harvest Love a ‘break-up’ record may be to understate its gravitas or emotional heft and to damn it by association with other break-up records, but that is essentially what it is. As might be expected, coming from this brand of sensitive folk-tinged singer-songwriter, the experiences that shape Harvest Love and the album’s ‘purpose’ get a much more comprehensive and discerning explanation and examination than ‘break-up’ record.
Herein lies both the strength and the weakness of Harvest Love. There can be a tendency amongst artists working in this arena to overthink their music or to expatiate something…
The 1960s were a peak time for Jackie DeShannon, as the singer/songwriter spent that decade not just prolifically releasing album after album of her own and scoring her biggest hits, but also writing numerous hit songs that became successes for other artists. Part of DeShannon’s process for her prolific output of this time was working out the arrangements and structures of her new creations with demos.
Love Forever: Demo Recordings 1966-1968 collects 16 such demos, focusing on a highly active two-year period in which DeShannon was constantly creating new ideas. The recordings here are by no means rough home-recorded sketches. DeShannon was in-demand as a songwriter, and operating at such a high level within the music industry…
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…
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.
“Underground” is a relative term. One could argue that all the ‘60s San Francisco psychedelic bands were underground, because the music they made was so far removed from the pop and rock sounds that came before them. But of all the bands in the scene, Lamb was perhaps the most underground of them all. It wasn’t just that their blend of rock, folk, classical, country, blues, and gospel was as hard to classify as any of the era. It was also their vibe.
Along with classically trained guitarist and songwriting partner Bob Swanson, Barbara Mauritz’s versatile vocals paced material often imbued with a haunting, mystical aura. Yet they could also be earthy and rootsy, occasionally drifting into spacey psychedelia with hints of raga-rock.
Part of the charm of I’m with Her‘s 2018 debut album, See You Around, was the sense of spontaneity and discovery that filled the music. The acoustic supergroup trio of Sarah Jarosz, Aoife O’Donovan, and Sara Watkins sounded as if they were still exploring the possibilities of working together in the studio, and they were having fun seeing how their talents and ideas could fit together. After See You Around became a critical and commercial success, I’m With Her played to legions of enthusiastic fans on tour, and they won a Grammy Award for the song “Call My Name,” so their second album was destined to be something different, and in that, 2025’s Wild and Clear and Blue does not disappoint. See You Around‘s effectiveness was in large part a product…
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…
It’s a real decision to do an album of tunes on the alto-violin, an instrument similar to the viola in size but played vertically, like a cello.
Fiddle player and composer Ultan O’Brien, who hails from the ‘wilds of County Clare in the West of Ireland’ has done just that with Dancing the Line and the lower notes of the alto breathe rustic life into these fourteen songs, six traditional and eight composed by Ultan.
An engaging artist with a keen interest in the improvisational side of Irish music, Ultan’s playing is muscular, with the growl of the alto-violin a point of difference. You can hear it straight off on ‘Iron Mountain Foothills’, an original piece (perhaps improvised?) that has echoes of a war lament and plays out with thick, metallic…
…Recently, there has been an evolution towards a more immersive and holistic brand of ecological music. Artists have been increasingly keen to engage with specific locations, encouraging deep listening utilising field recordings and local narratives to embellish their connection with a landscape. Jenny Sturgeon is one of the most successful recent advocates of this approach; her 2024 album paths.made.walking was a triumphant celebration of the Scottish landscape. It comes as no surprise to see Sturgeon listed as a backing vocalist on Iona Lane’s new album, Swilkie.
Lane is a songwriter based in the Highlands, and her practice revolves around the conservation and ecology of her native wild places. She set out her stall on her sparkling, assured debut…
It’s fair to describe Peggy Seeger as folk music royalty by now. Just a glance at her family tree reveals a plethora of star-studded names.
She’s the half-sister of folk legend (and Bob Dylan mentor) Pete Seeger, while musician Mike Seeger is another sibling. She is also, of course, the widow of Scottish singer Ewan MacColl, which makes her the stepmother to the late Kirsty MacColl and grandmother to Bombay Bicycle Club‘s Jamie MacColl.
Seeger though has been a prolific artist in her own right over the last 70 years or so. She’s been a prolific feminist, with the seminal I’m Gonna Be An Engineer amongst her credits, and was a visitor to the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp during the 1980s.
Based in Spain with two Irishmen (frontman Garrett Wall and bassist Dave Mooney), an Englishman (trumpeter Howard Brown) and an American (Robbie K. Jones on cajon and banjo) and named for workers on the New York subway system, the quartet came together in 2006 since which time they’ve released eight albums of generally lively and upbeat songs built around the core instrumentation of acoustic guitar, electric bass, trumpet and cajon with smatterings of banjo, uke and mandolin. So Tracks Laid, Tracks Covered is a sort of taking stock retrospective and looking ahead, a double set that pulls together back catalogue material from their first six albums and numbers only previously released on EPs alongside new songs and a collection of covers…
Having known each other for two decades, and after recording a live album in 2018, Gordie Tentrees and Jaxon Haldane combine in a Nashville studio under the auspices of producer Nash (brother of Kacey) Chambers.
The pre-released pair ‘Time’ and ‘Arcata’ are both Tentrees songs: the former is a bluegrass number on county road time, where quad-biking, fishing and skinny dipping goes on because “nothing happens till we make it happen”; the latter is a musician’s picaresque journey in which his “lost, forlorn…blue” narrator drives through the redwoods to get home to his beloved and her “morning breath” down in that California town.
The quirky ‘Tinkering’, which appropriately took Tentrees two years to finish, begins with our…
…”More Songs About Love” adds eight new stripped-down tracks to the collection, including delicate acoustic versions of Anniversary’s standout tracks; a captivating French translation of crowd favourite “Rattlesnake”; and Lapell’s unique take on a handful of beloved classics, including her impassioned version of “Feels Like We Always Go Backwards” by Tame Impala.
Anniversary is Canadian singer-songwriter Abigail Lapell’s 6th album (if we include last year’s lengthy EP of lullabies). Her success has not reached much beyond her native land, as is often the way with Canadian acts, but she’s a proven talent, one who deserves a higher international profile.
Anniversary consists of 11 poetic folk-country meditations on love. However, anyone seeking…
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…
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…
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.