The past is the only thing that lasts … if you move too fast
Yeah, that’s a line from my song “Deco Dance” (Night Lights) that Lou Reed inspired (note the banana reference in the intro and then look at the banana on the cover of the first Andy Warhol produced Velvet Underground & Nico album) and that I wrote over fifty years ago. And I’m humbled to admit that at that young and dumb age (25 although it did seem old at the time) I had no idea how true that would prove (the past being the only thing that lasts part) or how fast I was moving at the time or the totally crazy idea that I’d be releasing tracks that were recorded all those years ago … now. Visions of the Night 1975-2025 is finally available in it’s enhanced, enchanted…
Category: folk
Few artists so consistently bare their souls with such blunt honestly as Ruston Kelly. Repeatedly he seeks some kind of release from calamitous experiences ranging from addiction to failed relationship only to find himself back in the depths of depression once again. Such candour runs through his three solo studio albums with a bellow of defiance in his 2023 release ‘Weakness’. For this album Kelly introduces what may seem a complete change of direction, namely joy. But Pale Through the Window is neither revelation nor a self-help manual. If Kelly has not exorcised his demons, he can live with them. He can find happiness alongside struggle and what really comes through is a sense of gratitude that he is alive and can experience emotions lighter than relentless darkness.
Between Worlds is the first collaboration between two established members of the New York art and music scene. Leslie Graves’ previous release was 2023’s “Hidden In The Days” while Toby Goodshank is known as a long-standing member of The Moldy Peaches, best known for their song ‘Anyone Else But You’.
The ten tracks here were co-written by the pair and have an ethereal quality that might be described as dreamy or psychedelic. Acoustic guitars and vocals that float above them give an other-worldly feel to the record by these Brooklyn-based artist-musicians.
Goodshank has had a lengthy solo career, recording and self-releasing fourteen albums in a five-year spell and touring Europe several times with…
When announcing his sixth studio album, With Heaven on Top, on Instagram earlier this week, Zach Bryan added the disclaimer, “Hope you don’t hate it.” Now that the followup to 2024’s The Great American Bar Scene has arrived.
With Heaven on Top spans 25 tracks. Bryan tends to prefer an overloaded album, as evidenced by the 19-song track list on The Great American Bar Scene and the 16-song track list on Zach Bryan (2023) — and especially by the 34 entries on 2022’s American Heartbreak.
After the rapid release of three studio albums in the span of three years, not counting a flurry of EPs and live recordings, Bryan mostly took last year off to recalibrate. He still racked up a few headlines regarding his high-profile break-up…
Emma Tricca’s Prisms of Winter is an intimate recording — a collection of twelve stripped‑down live recordings that feel less like a performance and more like a whispered conversation between artist and listener. Recorded in London’s backrooms and scattered studios, the album is suffused with a quiet magic, and the kind of intimacy that makes you lean in closer, as though Tricca were singing directly into your ear.
This is Tricca at her most vulnerable and poetic. By paring back the arrangements, she exposes the bare bones of her songs — the words, the voice, the guitar — and in doing so, reveals their timeless strength. The immediacy of the recordings creates a sense of closeness, as if each track were a secret shared in confidence.
With a repertoire of unusual and rarely played regional tunes alongside more familiar session favourites, The English Fiddle Ensemble bring joyous harmonies and striking rhythms to traditional English tunes.
…This is a debut album from a quartet of English fiddlers, all with firm reputations on the English traditional dance scene.
The sheer scholarly detail of the sleeve notes, explaining the provenance of each tune, reveals the dedication and respect with which they all embrace the English tune tradition.
Leading the ensemble is Bryony Griffith, a Yorkshire fiddler who will be familiar to those who’ve heard bands such as Bedlam, The Demon Barbers and The Witches of Elswick.
The Worm Moon is the fifth full length LP from New Hampshire’s Footings, home to the songs of underground music lifer Eric Gagne. Out now on Feeding Tube records, The Worm Moon is an immersive set of brief skeletal folk-rock missives and instrumental interludes that rewards repeated through-listens. Thematically The Worm Moon deals with attempts to find peace and growth within spaces of decay and stagnation, reflecting its title which refers to a full moon in March. A time when the worms start moving again, and all the new possibilities of spring are just around the corner – but we are also reminded of all that living tissue which fell the previous Autumn, upon which the worms feast. Like many works of art surfacing at this point in history, this…
Richmond, Virginia-based singer-songwriter Kyle Davis crafts an emotively resonant sound across Jericho, his seventh studio album. A seamless rock and folk cohesion envelops within themes of personal loss and the perseverance needed to overcome.
“As I look back on making Jericho, I realize that creating records is a form of therapy for me,” Davis says. “Not every song is entirely first-person, but the themes of grief, resilience and reflection are universal. I hope these songs help listeners feel a connection to their own journeys.” Davis is also joined by a very talented cast of musicians, re-uniting the team from his 1999 Sony debut, Raising Heroes.
Album opener “The Last Line” melds soul…
Gaelic singer Kim Carnie’s A’ Chailleach is, to quote, “a concept record rooted in female folklore, spell work and hidden histories”. Steeped in tradition but rich in new sounds, it’s a thrilling and inspiring soundscape.
An impressive guest list features here, including Julie Fowlis, Donald Shaw, and Megan Henderson. Jerry Douglas lends his signature touch to the Americana-tinged ‘Clò nan Gillean’, while Innes White adds a layer of magic to the love charm ‘Eòlas Gràdhaich’. One of the standouts is ‘Òran na Bèiste Maoile’, featuring Senegalese musician Seckou Keita, where West African and Gaelic rhythms intertwine to irresistible effect.
At the core of the album are Carnie’s smooth, pure vocals – confident, expressive and…
Le Vent du Nord have been at the forefront of the Quebecois progressive folk movement for more than two decades, and yet are still as joyful and dynamic as ever.
Voisinages, their 13th album, whose title translates to ‘neighbourhoods’ in English, features 12 tracks “telling the stories of the neighbourhoods that connect us and especially those that have enriched Quebec’s repertoire: Irish and Scottish Celts, American folk, songs from Acadia, and French-speaking Americans.”
Whether traditional, like the rambunctious call-and-response of opener ‘Par-dessus le pont’ or newly-minted from the five members of Le Vent du Nord themselves (Nicolas Boulerice, André Brunet, Réjean Brunet, Olivier Demers and…
Following up from the collaboration on Vol.I from 2015, that drew from The Great Irish Songbook, Tony Christie and Ranagri continue the Tradition series where the combo delve into, erm, the Irish traditional library of work. At the time, it might have seemed an unusual collaboration, not so much for Ranagri but more for TC with his legacy of chart bothering hits and anthems known and loved by the masses, that took Cropredy by storm (as did Ranagri’s set) in 2023.
Clearly, the TC&R partnership is proving quite an unexpected success with not only has legs but an obvious mutual appreciation for one another and an affinity with the material. The evidence? Just check the moment in the Whiskey In The Jar video when Tony stands back and simply watches…
Cosán Casta means ‘winding path’, an apt title for this collaboration between fiddle player Aoife Ní Bhriain and pianist Cormac McCarthy. Their musical wanderings have taken them in many directions – classical, jazz, avant-garde – and have now brought them back to Irish traditional music, influenced by what they’ve picked up on the way.
‘A Mháire’ begins with the fiddle alone (Ní Bhriain has a deep interest in J.S. Bach’s works for solo violin), then she bends notes like a piper – and it turns out it’s inspired by a slow air collected from a blind piper called O’Hannigan, a year before the Great Famine. Ní Bhriain’s and McCarthy’s beautiful piece is inflected by that coming tragedy. Sometimes McCarthy’s piano supports the fiddle. In ‘Butterfly’, chords become blooms…
The sad truth about memory is that it’s inherently unreliable: when you access it, you’re not remembering the event itself so much as the last time you recalled it. It’s this malleability of history that John Calvin Abney wanted to focus on when it came to his seventh LP, Transparent Towns. “Damn the dust storm / Blowing through my head,” he bemoans the fuzziness of recollection on the title track before equally lamenting all the empty words that go unspoken: “Damn the days / We let go left unsaid.”
‘Last Chance’ finds Abney meditating on the passage of time, and while he’s got enough insight to feel the good times for what they are in the moment (“Struck by suspicion / I’d never feel what I felt then”), that doesn’t mean…
The pitch for the music of The Far West, whose new album is their first since 2014, is “horribly painful songs that you can dance to”, according to bass player Robert Black.
There is less pain, however, than resignation and expectation, but the arrangements often mask this. There are more swayalongs than hootenannies here, but Black is right about danceability on the infectious ‘Meet Me Where We Parted Last’, which uses the horn section well, and the far too short ‘In Your Own Time’ (“things will come, just as surely as the rising sun”).
‘See for Yourself’ opens the album with the sort of music Bob Dylan was making for ‘Blonde On Blonde’; indeed, there’s a lyrical nod to the man on “this rolling stone is now covered in moss”.
1. Tobacco City – Buffalo
2. Florist – Have Heaven
3. Nico Georis – Geological Observations
4. Dean Wareham – Yesterday’s Hero
5. Eiko Ishibashi – October
6. Brown Horse – Dog Rose
7. Black Country, New Road – Besties
8. The Waterboys – Hopper’s On Top (Genius)
9. Songs Of Green Pheasant – Dark
10. Valerie June – Sweet Things Just for You
11. Index For Working Musik – Sister
12. Jason Isbell – Foxes in the Snow
13. Sam Akpro – Evenfall
14. Snapped Ankles – Pay the Rent
15. Butler, Blake & Grant – Bring an End
A seminal moment in modern acoustic guitar music is being revisited as Drag City released the 10th-anniversary reissue of Land of Plenty, the spellbinding 2015 debut from duo Bill MacKay & Ryley Walker.
To put things in perspective, 2015 was the same year Walker released his debut follow-up, Primrose Green. MacKay had yet to sign to Drag City (this would happen in 2017 with Esker), but released an album of John Hulburt tunes on Tompkins Square – Sunrise: Bill MacKay Plays the Songs of John Hulburt. Walker was also a Hulburt fan, having co-produced Hulburt’s 1972 private press LP, Opus III, the same year.
…The story of Land of Plenty is one of immediate artistic connection. After first…
Holly Carter may not be a name that readers are too familiar with, but it is very likely that she soon will be, for she is a prodigious talent. Her main claim to fame so far is that she was voted best instrumentalist in the Americana Music Association UK awards in 2023 and again in 2024. Her fingerpicking acoustic and electric guitar-playing style, together with being one of the few professional female steel guitar players in the UK, attest to her musical ability, and you can add to that a substantial songwriting skill. And now comes her first full-length album, Leave Your Mark.
Carter is based in Bristol, currently a hotbed of musical talent, and has made something of a name for herself with her gigs local to that area, as well as appearances at various music…
Gekidan Buraiha was a theater company, a part of the so-called Angura scene that included notable troupes such as Tenjō Sajiki, led by Shūji Terayama; Jōkyō Gekijo, led by Jūrō Kara, Black Tent Theater (originally known as Theater Center 68), led by Makoto Satō; and Waseda Little Theater, led by Tadashi Suzuki.
Gekidan Buraiha began through the efforts of its main actor Kanna Ten (Minoru Takahashi) and his friends, who were all members of the same theater workshop at Kokugakuin University. It was the early ’70s, and the crew would frequently drop in at the rehearsal space occupied by Jūrō Kara’s Jōkyō Gekidan, essentially becoming part of the group’s support crew, and appearing on occasion as extras in their performances.
MOJNA blends newly composed music with contrapuntal fragments and improvisation in their inventive take on Nordic folk music. Featuring fingerstyle guitar, Hardanger fiddle, and clarinet/bass clarinet, they create a distinctive sound that has become their signature.
There are bears and boats here, gusts of wind, a drooping cigarette, though you don’t really need to know the details: this is music so beautiful, so expressive, that you can just ride the waves with this outstanding Swedish/Norwegian trio. They have, quite rightly, been showered with awards for their unique sound, sumptuous and spacious, sometimes playful, sometimes gentle and reflective, with a rich bass clarinet, tiny bird-like fiddle notes and a guitar that ranges from…
Home is the charming result of a collaboration between Xan Tyler from Glasgow and Amsterdam-based Jonathan Brown, aka Dusty Stray. Both are highly accomplished solo performers who have made several individual albums.
They met through mutual admiration for each other’s work, and their musical partnership has evolved with this project. The album was recorded remotely during COVID, with tracks being sent back and forth and fashioned between their two studios. The fact that they were not together when they recorded Home makes its warmth and intimacy all the more remarkable.
The quality of the mix is delightful, and as a duet, their voices match each other’s perfectly. Both are extremely generous with the space…