The songwriter’s new yuletide compilation is an extensive diary of his decades-long musical quests. It’s also a far-reaching look into Christmas’ greater profundity, a celebration of life in the face of death.
Sufjan Stevens’ dense catalog defies easy explanation. Is he a quirked-up twee musician with orchestral flourishes, as heard on 2005’s Illinois? Maybe he’s an Elliott Smith acolyte with lachrymose lyrics, as we heard a decade later on Carrie & Lowell. Or he could be an adventurous experimentalist, whether that’s in the vein of 2001’s IDM exercise Enjoy Your Rabbit or 2021’s collection of forty-nine ambient pieces, Convocations. The best way to understand someone as eclectic and comprehensive as Stevens is to know that he is both all and none of these things.
Category: indie-folk
On their fourth studio album, Abalone, New York-based Upstate confront the realities of growing older without allowing life’s harsh experiences to harden them. It’s potentially weighty subject matter, but the band approaches it with warmth, optimism and an often irresistibly upbeat blend of pop, jazz, Americana and folk.
Even the album title, Abalone, is a nod to this idea. The title track uses the abalone shell as a metaphor for how a lifetime of experiences form a rough, hard outer shell, but inside is beautifully smooth, iridescent material that reflects light in shifting shades of color. The concept of time comes up repeatedly throughout the record, starting with the opening track, “Corner,” a beautiful exercise in three-part harmonies and…
Sometimes there’s music that makes you feel like you’ve been listening to it your whole life. It immediately gets under your skin and stays in your head forever. Even when an artist is new, their songs might sound as iconic to you as, say, J Mascis or Jason Pierce’s stuff. Juice Webster somehow works exactly this kind of magic on your mind. Her 2023 debut, Julia, felt like coming home, like returning to your old teenage bedroom full of posters, vinyl, and precious memories. Her sophomore outing, Kind of Fantasy, is akin to Greta Gerwig’s Narnia – it’s like reliving a whole mix of emotions just by opening an old wardrobe full of you-know-what.
Having started down this path around 2019, with bare folk ballads in the vein of Joan Baez…
The templates and aesthetic he draws from on his third album are about as old as the concept of popular music itself, channelling the canyons around Los Angeles, top pickers in 1960s Nashville studios, and smoke-filled Greenwich Village folk clubs. Assisted on some tracks by co-producer Jonathan Wilson, who knows a thing or two himself about reviving the glory days of West Coast swoon, the LA-based Palestinian–American musician reaches for new levels of emotional resonance with an authority that instantly shuts down claims of derivative recycling.
Granted, we’ve been here before: Burton’s deceptively simple songs are ultimately folk songs, occasionally tinged with country, at times channelled through classic rock…
The year is 2008. Steve Gunn was experiencing the itch to start working on material under his own name after having spent the last several years playing in and around Philadelphia and Brooklyn in collaborative projects such as GHQ. He had recorded some experimental CDRs on his own under the moniker Moongang before branching out in 2007 to placing the name “Steve Gunn” on titles for the first time. The first couple of releases displayed an immediate leap in his songwriting and confidence. His growth as a solo artist seemed to meet the use of his name head on with a burst of creativity. Nowhere was this growth more visible than with the 2008 title “Sundowner”. The album’s first iteration was released on CD by Digitalis Recordings.
South London-based multidisciplinary artist Clara Mann whispers the secrets of the universe through fey folk songs. You’ll hear and envision: the stirrings of ghosts, will-o’-the-wisps, shadows dancing, and eternity beckoning. These bewitching and weightless songs are prayers sculpted by the wind, which you can walk through like a door. Lyrically, Mann sings as if delivering a sentence to a friend to see their reaction. Yet the words are also for her to assimilate, to feel, to mold, as if listening to someone speak with her voice. Within these folk idioms reside heaven and hell, pulling Mann in opposite directions to truth.
Along with Kiki Cavazos, Natalie Wildgoose, Daisy Rickman, and Juni Habel, Mann is one of the most arresting contemporary folk musicians.
Both an example and an explanation of a blending of two words, the fact that the name of Tommy Lefroy‘s long-awaited debut album is a portmanteau seems fitting.
While labour economist Guy Standing coined the term The Precariat takes its title from (referring to the precarious social class that began emerging in Europe at the beginning of the 21st century), almost everything about the project of Wynter Bethel and Tessa Mouzourakis exists in a perpetual state of “and,” not “or.”
Respectively from northern Michigan and Vancouver, BC, the singer-songwriters met in Nashville, but their project really got underway when both moved to the UK (“I had nothing, then I found you / Built an empire in…
Henry O Henry likes to point out that even after 30 years, he is essentially “an Irishman in New York”. The key reason is that coming up with Apocrypha, his debut album at not exactly an early age, is a very personal thing. He also notes that he is “formally and informally not a musician”.
So why all these notes? Because this is all very personal to him, as it is probably to all singer-songwriters around, but the key there is: how able are they to transfer all that is personal and make it accessible to all the listeners that decide to encounter their personal stuff and make it count for them. Make that personal general.
Henry O Henry is able to that on his debut Apocrypha completely and in full. Maybe it is all the years of personal experience, or it could…
The band Great Lakes was formed in Athens, Georgia, in 1996 with members Ben Crum, Dan Donahue, and Jamey Huggins, and from there, the numbers grew, with a revolving cast of musicians from the local scene involved, until, by 2008, Crum was left as the only permanent member.
The Elephant Six Collective plays a part in the early days of Great Lakes; the Elephant Six Collective being a number of bands all connected to four friends in Ruston, Louisiana, who shared a love for music and exchanged homemade cassette recordings, the friends went on to form bands such as The Apples in Stereo, Neutral Milk Hotel and The Olivia Tremor Control. Originally part of the Elephant Six Collective’s Athens-based second‑wave, connected through the people…
Soft-spoken singer/songwriter Fenne Lily wrote and recorded her fourth album over a period of a couple years that followed an unexpected breakup, included struggles with confidence and the loss of a pet, and spanned a relocation from her native England to New York City. While the songs wrestle with these events, they also reflect hard-won qualities like strength, assuredness, and hopefulness. She ultimately titled the album Win Win. Recorded live in the studio with her respective bands in England and New York, the resulting performances are hushed and expansive at once. The set opens with the forward-looking “Uh Huh,” a song that changes points of view as those involved move on from a relationship. While her elegant songs are more rooted in ’70s…
A New Jersey native and former member of bands in New Jersey, Maryland, and N.Y.C. (where he attended grad school), Jeffrey Silverstein put down roots as an educator and writer in Portland, Oregon, before launching his solo career there. He expanded arrangements from the guitar and drum machine of his earliest songs to a dreamier palette that added bass, live drums, and pedal steel by his second album, Western Sky Music.
Picking up where that album left off — but seeming softer and gentler if anything, as if trying not to disturb the surrounding environment — Doggone was recorded with returning bassist and drummer Alex Chapman and Dana Buoy, pedal steel/electric guitarist Rick Pedrosa, and keyboardist Paul Damian Hogan. Its small handful of…
Between 2023’s Accompany and this, his next studio album and label release, maker of soft-spoken, dreamy indie songs, Michael Nau released a slew of self-recorded albums and EPs, some of them instrumentals, some experimenting with new instruments, and most all recorded on portable tape machines.
He eventually returned to the studio, in this case Little Jamaica studio in Burlington, Vermont, with the songs that would become Popfly, which was also partly recorded at home. With Nau playing most of the instruments, it was a relatively intimate endeavor co-produced with prior collaborator Benny Yurco. The rest of its contributors were family (Nau’s kids and wife, Whitney McGraw) and a few other friends on select…
Flora Hibberd is a British songwriter, living in France, and captures a romantic edge commonly heard on Marianne Faithfull’s incendiary pop. Hibberd’s voice is sharp, but the instrumentation balances it with sophisticated hooks and orchestral flourishes. This work Mammoth showcases a command of the studio, embellishing lyrical points with clever nips and tucks that accentuate the ballads. “Silent Movie Baby” opens with what sounds like a projectionist working the mechanisms, just as Hibberd appears to sing through a microphone from the 1920s; crackled lines etching at the ear. “Silent Movie Baby” was released as a single in September.
Mammoth follows a structure that links each song to a part of the artist’s life. “Deltaplane” is…
While Jonathan Something (aka Jonathan Searles) has not gone full Nashville on his latest effort, One More Lonesome Cowboy Song, there is no mistaking the cosmic country influences spread across the record.
Beyond the cowboy-centric title and album art, his latest draws on folks like Gram Parsons and features impressive acoustic guitar fingerpicking throughout the seven songs. There have been elements of the genre in his past music, but One More Lonesome Cowboy Song is a complete musical departure from his last record, which was steeped in ’80s pop synthesizers, as well as other dives into garage rock and sample-heavy soul.
This record opens on “Country Rose,” sounding a bit like Harry Nilsson wielding an acoustic…
Many current artists who have been filed by PR people with that good old singer-songwriter label have long ago abandoned what initially signified it – a singer with a singular acoustic instrument explaining what bothers or makes her or him happy. Not only have the lyrical themes diversified (a long time at that), but the musical approach has too, from diversified arrangements to bringing in elements that are not essentially either folk, blues or country in some shape or form.
With the fact that she is a vocalist/multi-instrumentalist (flute, guitar, etc.) Chicago’s V.V. Lightbody immediately defies that old singer-songwriter label. As somebody who has collaborated with a wide spectrum of artists, from Harry Styles to jazz drummer…
…includes three new acoustic versions of previously released songs as well as two entirely new tracks including previously released single ‘Pity,’ and fun, rocking indie folk anthem, ‘Fell in Love (Couldn’t Get Out)’ featuring Cat Clyde.
Cowboy hats and colorful shirts can be a deceiving thing for musicians. For a general set of listeners that rely on musical snippets it would immediately indicate that who they have in front of them is your regular cow poking country singer whose life dream is to end up in some Nashville studio leading her/him to Billboard country charts.
Yet in these modern times, classic country (and western) is just one stream, and country pop, roots, Americana, and Canadiana are not only the terms in vogue, but very real genres or…
Arborist is the alias used by Belfast-based singer songwriter Mark McCambridge for his musical projects, something he has pursued for the best part of the last decade.
His songs broadly exist in an alt-folk/alt-country space although carry enough individuality to make categorisation difficult. His music may have existed on the periphery of any scene or genre but he’s attracted the attention of some big names in music over the years.
His 2015 debut single featured the vocals of Kim Deal and An Endless Sequence of Dead Zeroes, his 2023 Northern Irish Music Prize winning third album, was recorded at SpaceBomb Studios in Virginia with musician and producer Matthew E White. The KLF co-founder…
June McDoom grew up in a Jamaican household in Florida, and her family was a musical one. Her father was a DJ and carpenter who built his own speakers and multi-room sound systems — she grew up hearing amplified basslines from his DJ sets through the floor — and her grandfather was a mento musician who built his own rumba boxes and gave June her first access to a guitar. While her own music takes further influence from everything from 1960s and ’70s folk-pop and pop-soul to Cocteau Twins, the significance of mentioning her upbringing becomes evident upon hearing her unusual spin on eerie indie folk. She landed on Jagjaguwar’s roster on the strength of early short-form releases, and she constructed Follow the Light, her full-length debut,…