William Crighton’s Colonial Drift plays as a slow journey across landscape, memory and time. The album moves in three clear movements, threaded together by fragments of radio chatter, environmental sound and drifting noise, creating the sense of travelling through a country where past and present sit side by side.
Crighton has built a reputation for expansive, story-driven songwriting shaped by landscape and history, particularly across albums such as Water and Dust. Here he works with a close-knit group of collaborators. Luke Davison’s drums and Corey McCormick’s bass provide a steady foundation, while electric guitars from CJ Stranger and Jeff Lang add texture and edge. Subtle synthesiser and environmental sound deepen the atmosphere…
Category: folk
Intensely expressive free-verse vocal laments over sliding violins, hammered santouri, guitar, and oud – the hybrid sounds of the Mediterranean in the early 20th century.
“Aman Aman” cry the singers on these recordings, their voices preserved on 78rpm discs cut between 1911-1935. The phrase roughly translates to “mercy,” a call of despair, but also one of joy and admiration. On many of these sides, that full range of emotion is transmitted at once.
Some of these artists are legends, others lost to time. Nearly half are female vocalists, a big part of the Cafe Aman tradition but not as well represented on contemporary releases. All were affected by conflicts leading up to the Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1923, and the forced…
Conceived under eclipsed skies, Path of Totality, the new album from The Montvales, unites the vast American diaspora into one collective and cosmic tapestry. Inspired by the long tradition of radical country and folk artists, longtime friends Sally Buice and Molly Rochelson use their passion for literature and storytelling to craft an album that reckons with the current global fever pitch.
The album’s 12 introspective, thematically and sonically layered tracks chart a transformative pilgrimage through an inextricably connected world. A woman desperate to save her community from a gas pipeline in “Plains of Ohio,” a devout grandmother traveling across the world to Yugoslavia in search of the Virgin Mary in “Our Lady,” and a trouble-making Bible College…
For Sassparilla frontman and songwriter Kevin Blackwell, there is one lyric in particular on the band’s eight studio album, Honey, I’m Using Again, that feels especially truthful to where he is at this stage of his life: “Despite all my kicking / My protesting / I’ll be damned that I got old,” he bemoans on ‘I’ll Be Damned’, but inevitability of ageing is just one of the honest looks at the human experience explored on the LP. As its title suggests, addiction is also covered, along with homelessness and death. These are subjects that could feel like a chore to listen to, but with the band’s mix of punk and americana, they make for a fresh batch of invigorating, short, sharp life lessons with a Southern gothic flavour to them.
‘When I Get Off This Mountain’, heavy with…
Danny George Wilson follows up the Danny & The Champions of the World album, You Are Not a Stranger Here, with a collection of introspective, powerful songs. The cosmic landscapes of You Are Not a Stranger Here give way to something more plaintive, rawer and earthier. It may or may not have been Wilson’s intention, but the two albums make wonderful companion pieces. Arcade seems to find Wilson at a crossroads: it feels retrospective and nostalgic, but, like Janus, also seems to look forward – although sometimes it feels as if Wilson is stumbling towards the future.
If Arcade finds Wilson in a moment of transition lyrically, this is not the case musically. Wilson has, for a long time, been a brilliant songwriter, singer and master performer. There is now…
The latest from the Nashville-based duo Paper Wings will reward fans who embraced their signature amalgamation of literate folk with bluegrass, as well as their lyrical willingness to explore the territory beneath the thin veil of decency people and societies present. On Mountains on the Moon, though, the prevailing themes are longing and abiding resilience through individual strength. A stern sense of self-reliance and clear-eyed hope may be the most political statement of the album – songwriting partners Emily Mann and Wila Frank have plumbed depths both personal and universal before. Here, they seek defiance through resolve and eschew despair in favour of cautious optimism.
The opener, ‘Fumbling’ alliteratively asks…
Digging even deeper into a personal archive of home-recorded tapes from another time, If You Wanna Laugh, You Gotta Cry Sometimes is the third volume of previously unreleased songs from the already obscure Georgia singer/songwriter Robert Lester Folsom. In the mid-’70s, when Folsom was just out of his teens, he self-released the studio album Music and Dreams. For decades, the psychedelic soft rock of Music and Dreams served as Folsom’s only public output, and its combination of quality, mystery, and rarity eventually made it a collector’s item. Folsom’s archive of demos, unreleased solo tracks, and tunes made with friends on his reel-to-reel four-track has proved just as interesting as the strange moods of Music and Dreams, and If You…
Hurray for the Riff Raff release Live Forever, a new live record on the exact two-year anniversary of The Past Is Still Alive-named one of the Best Albums of the 2020s So Far by Pitchfork, and one of the Best Albums of 2024 by the New York Times, Atlantic, Associated Press, NPR Music, Rolling Stone, Billboard, Out, Mojo, Uncut, and a multitude of others.
Live Forever was captured over the course of two sold-out summer nights at the Old Town School of Folk Music in bandleader Alynda Segarra’s new home of Chicago. Spanning 14 songs, Live Forever presents The Past Is Still Alive in its entirety, as well as a selection of Hurray for the Riff Raff’s show-stopping, set-defining staples: decrying ICE on the poetic “Precious Cargo”…
Lynn Miles may not yet be among your ‘top ten Canadian songwriters’, but A Bouquet of Black Flowers may be about to change that. With three Canadian Folk Music English Songwriter of the Year Awards and a JUNO Award for Roots & Traditional Album of the Year: Solo under her belt, Miles’ music, whilst not unsung, is deserving of wider recognition. In 2008, she began re-recording selected songs from her back catalogue with voice and guitar, or piano accompaniment. The resulting four volumes of Black Flowers albums were released over the next six years. Fifteen of the forty songs from that series were picked and remastered for A Bouquet of Black Flowers. This summation of a recording career approaching its 40th anniversary is a fitting introduction for anyone…
…features five brand-new additions: four acoustic “live off the floor” versions recorded with guitarist BJ Baartmans and a new single co-written and recorded with Luke Doucet and Melissa McClelland of the band Whitehorse.
Memories often seem to gravitate around specific songs, which stick in your mind as some of the defining pieces of a particular time or place.
They hide in the recesses of your brain, awaiting the next time you’ll listen to that particular song again, and everything will come flooding back. Music defines different periods of your life, but it can also help you better understand them.
That is, if, like Suzie Ungerleider, you’re lucky enough to have the talent (and courage) to translate your experiences into music.
Prince Edward Island, on Canada’s eastern seaboard, is a hotbed of musical talent, with a revolving community of extremely talented musicians who are helping to preserve the Celtic/folk traditions of the area while advancing the genre’s boundaries by infusing them with elements of pop, swing and country.
One such is the formidable group The East Pointers, formed in 2014 by Tim Chaisson (fiddle and vocal), Koady Chaisson (banjo), and their cousin Jake Charron (guitar/keyboards), one of the most exciting live bands in the genre.
Tim Chaisson had already made something of a name for himself as singer-songwriter of some ability, having been a member of the band Kindle in his early teens and joining with others…
A companion piece to the album, Right Now!, this collection contains additional recordings from those sessions, as well as Tchad Blake remixes and reworkings of songs from Right Now! All recordings, except for “Reap What You Sow,” have never been released. The psychedelic supergroup featuring Dave Alvin, Victor Krummenacher, David Immerglück, Michael Jerome, and Jesse Sykes continues to defy expectations and genre.
The album opens with an instrumental reinterpretation of Spellbinder inspired by Hungarian jazz guitarist Gabor Szabo, whose work has long influenced guitarist David Immerglück. “I’ve been a huge fan of Gabor Szabo my whole life,” Immerglück says. “When the idea came up to record Spellbinder, it felt like a no-brainer.”
Jenn Grant is a multi-award-winning Canadian singer-songwriter with eight albums to date. Queen of the Strait is, however, by far the most personal. It covers many deeply private subjects, including escaping from a dark physical attack when she was 18 and living briefly in London, to the heartbreak of going on a local TV show when she was a child to give her dog away as her mother was unable to pay for needed heart surgery.
‘Daddy and his Shotgun’ reveals her memories of being taken Goose hunting by her father and how she would become somehow attached and name the birds before they were shot down. She is now a vegetarian. The bravery she has shown to write about these and other events that have shaped her life and beliefs is quite extraordinary.
Welsh instrumentalist Huw Marc Bennett’s new album, Heol Las, cuts a refreshingly fine dash. Taking traditional melodies from South Wales – notably the Morgannwg/Glamorgan region – and reimagining them through a lens of folk jazz and psychedelic roots, Bennett paints a beguiling vision. Cerddoriaeth werin, the folk music of Morgannwg, is vividly brought to modern life here.
‘Carol Haf’ (Summer Carol) opens the proceedings with a ceremonial feel – a bright, sparkling hope for the future – rooted in Bro Morgannwg’s (Vale of Glamorgan region) seasonal rituals. ‘Cân Gwasael’ (Wassail Song) dips down into a darker mood, playing tentatively with the winter tradition of the Mari Lwyd (Welsh midwinter horse-skull folk ritual) – spindly, brooding, haunting…
Out of press in its original form for years, controversial beat poet Allen Ginsberg‘s East Village love-in First Blues – a vast double-album of collaborations with Bob Dylan, Arthur Russell, Anne Waldman, David Mansfield, Perry Robinson, David Amram and many other friends and contemporaries is reissued via Death Is Not The End.
It’s hard to deny Ginsberg’s impact; his poetry alone was enough to shift the course of US counter culture, and you can visualise his contributions to downtown punk and folk. But his music career isn’t quite as intimately understood, which makes ‘First Blues’ a pretty vital artefact for anyone looking to investigate further. Ginsberg wrote and recorded the material between 1971 and 1983, taking the opportunity to leaf through his lengthy…
…This anniversary release of the band’s first EP includes three additional tracks: remastered demos of “31 Seasons in the Minor Leagues,” previously titled as “Tonight I’m So Down,” and “Lonesome Valley,” recorded at Echo Park Studios in Indiana during the ‘Hard to Love a Man’ sessions, as well as “One Thin Dime,” recorded during the Black Ram sessions at Sound of Music Recording Studios in Richmond, Virginia.
Let’s begin at the end, with the cover of Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London” that closes Magnolia Electric Co.‘s Hard to Love a Man EP. Mike “Slo-Mo” Brenner’s always elegant guitar work makes it clear that the song is probably a barnstormer live, probably saved for the first encore so that the band can cut loose…
Some albums become special through repeated listening: they grow on you, opening up over time to reveal more complex layers and hidden depths. Some are special because they represent a certain memorable point in the listener’s life: a graduation, a wedding, a death. Some are simply great from the word go, world-changing works of artistic genius. But very few come sprinkled with the kind of magic dust that coats the new album by Georgia Shackleton. This is an album with a story behind it, and that story is worth telling because it directly impacts the music. A distant relative of polar explorer Ernest Shackleton, Georgia recently came into possession of the Shackleton Violin, an instrument made from the floorboards of Ernest’s former home in Edinburgh.
Catrin Finch has been at the top her field for a long time now. The Welsh harpist was appointed to the ancient office of Royal Harpist by Prince Charles in 2000, was nominated for a Classical Brit Award in 2004 and her World Music collaborations with Seckou Keita resulted in their winning the 2019 BBC Radio 2 Folk Award for Best Duo.
After her three acclaimed albums with Keita, she released the striking Double You with Irish fiddler and classical violinist Aoife Ni Bhrian in 2023. And now, striking out with her first solo album in a decade, she turns to her self – in fact, to her 13-year-old self – in this beautiful set of pieces accompanied by short pieces of prose in the form of letters to herself, and archive family photos that focus on the young Katrin, and…
On his fifth album, Joe Wilkes delivers a powerful statement of intent. Hope in My Chest, Fire in My Throat finds the folk troubadour at his most focused, combining intricate finger-picking guitar with traditionally delivered songs rich in storytelling, humour, and sharp political observation. The album was conceived in the shadow of accident, illness, death, and personal upheaval, and stands as a testament to Wilkes’ determination to succeed at all costs. Rather than retreat inward, he leans into the rawness of experience, producing a record that feels lived-in and urgent.
The opening track, Seven Gypsies immediately surprises. Beginning with the sound of a Sarangi — a nod to the Middle East – it sets…
Hedera are a band of five tightly knit friends – violinist Lulu Austin, violin/viola player Maisie Brett, violinist/double bassist Beth Roberts, accordionist/ harpist Tamsin Elliott, and clarinettist Isis Wolf-Light – named after the Latin botanical term for ivy. The group’s debut album combines influences from Bulgaria to Bali, Ireland to Georgia, and establishes its mood of knotted, hypnotic locked groove from its opening track, ‘Sterretjie’ (named after an Afrikaans word for the coastal tern bird, which also means “little stars”). Brett’s violin passes the track’s melody to Wolf-Light’s clarinet and Elliott’s accordion with a bright, sparkling swiftness.
Many other moments of joy, lithe and spring-like, lift these 12 tracks. Roberts’ waltz about a Cornish meadow, Mayflies in June, travels…