David Morris of Red River Dialect has always been able to find the spiritual in ordinary objects. It’s a reflection, perhaps, of his training as a Buddhist monk — a habit of contemplation and co-existence with all the inhabitants of the world around him. On Basic Country Mustard, his most successful songs focus not on nature’s myriad wonders, but on what makes us human.
Consider, for instance, the title track, an extended meditation on the most plebian of condiments. Against a jangling guitar, a bouncy drum beat, and scattered piano chords, Morris observes the simplicity — just two ingredients: seeds and liquid — and the infinite variations of mustard. “The Ancient Chinese back in 1000 B.C./ The Romans and Japanese/ They all liked…
Category: indie-folk
Singer/songwriter runo plum started devoting more time to her music in 2020 during COVID-19 shutdowns, resulting in a handful of singles and EPs over the next four years. Not a spare solo act, she wrapped her intimate, introspective songs in atmospheric full-band arrangements early on, and she recorded her debut album in a remote cabin in Vermont with producer Lutalo (a fellow Minneapolis-born singer/songwriter and Winspear labelmate who also played drums on the record) and guitarist Noa Francis (plum’s partner). Titled patching, the breakup- and isolation-inspired album opens with “Sickness,” a song with both a light bounce and notes of melancholy, and with strummed acoustic and electric guitars, all combining to underscore lyrics…
…featuring 7 previously unheard tracks.
On caroline‘s self-titled 2022 debut, the eight-piece UK collective unveiled material that flirted with deliberateness and silences, crafting quietly intricate post-folk puzzles, full of strings and breath, to tantalize the patient listener. The follow-up, aptly titled caroline 2, sees the group occasionally accelerate to gear-grinding velocity, though the path to their destination is still not always a straight line.
The first single from the album, “Total euphoria,” resembles a slightly deconstructed Broken Social Scene, with twin guitars chugging out repetitive and asynchronous downstrokes and a drum thump that trips into and out of the fray. Euphoria is achieved with a kind of drunken side-step that…
The latest shapeshifting move by Wicca Phase Springs Eternal (aka Adam Andrzejewski, née McIlwee) sees this singular artist trade emo rap for country-folk, while losing little — if any — of the gothic atmosphere of his previous incarnation’s trap-heavy oeuvre.
Andrzejewski has experience when it comes to challenging preconceptions. Until 2013, he was co-founder and a pivotal member of emo mainstays Tigers Jaw. Reborn as Wicca Phase Springs Eternal, he’s since elevated Soundcloud rap from bedroom dalliance to sell out shows, guesting on tracks by — and forming close bonds with — artists as diverse as Lil Peep and Ethel Cain. Although previous Wicca Phase releases have certainly featured acoustic guitar numbers, fans who…
“Don’t you know a warning sign when you see it?” asks Hannah Pruzinsky. Their sophomore album as h. pruz, Red sky at morning, cites the old adage that alerts sailors of bad weather ahead. The storm brews behind the beauty of a burning sky, much like how Pruzinsky’s gloomy lyrics hide in the softness of their arrangements. They are interested in how the activity of the sky, no matter how erratic, represents real things to people. As a body of work, Red sky at morning is an exploration of what to do when facing a warning. Will you heed the word of the sky and jump ship, or will you move forward, traversing muddied waters? Pruzinsky extends this question to their songwriting practice — making music is always a gamble, commercially and personally. They feared writing…
Frank Turner’s The Next Ten Years is a limited edition set which comes as a follow up to the highly coveted The First Ten Years (2015) box set.
Spanning 29 non-album tracks, including live and radio sessions, covers, acoustic versions, and collaborations, this collection fills the gaps between studio albums over the past 10 years with treasured rarities – some of which are previously unreleased, and many pressed on vinyl for the first time.
I write this from a car park in Glasgow, working my way through the warm-up shows before Lost Evenings hits Edinburgh for its 8th (eighth!!!) instalment this weekend. Band and crew are humming like a well-oiled machine, I’m tired and my head is full of words for obscure songs, but life is good.
…Steve Gunn recorded his new LP Daylight Daylight with one primary collaborator. James Elkington, much like Gunn, is a languid singer-songwriter and a master of acoustic folk guitar.
Gunn and Elkington are old friends, and Elkington previously produced Gunn’s 2019 album The Unseen in Between. The two of them recorded Daylight Daylight at Elkington’s Nada Studios in Chicago, and Elkington contributed string and woodwind arrangements, which makes for a cool new dimension on a Steve Gunn record. A press release mentions Mark Hollis, Ennio Morricone, the Fall, and Basil Kirchin as inspirations, and the album includes violins and viola from from Macie Stewart, cellos from Ben Whiteley, upright bass from Nick Macri, and woodwinds from…
“Climb upon a bridge to far, go anywhere your heart desires.” The key phrase from the title track of Midlake’s sixth studio album conveys the perception that anything is within reach should an appropriate mind-set be attained. However, later on the album there are references to a “lion’s den” and “war within the valley of roselesss thorns,” a setting where “power and glory were in store.”
It seems, then, that this is a realm where escaping to a place called “far” is necessary for self-protection. Midlake singer and frontman Eric Pulido has said of the album’s “The Calling” that the song “has to do with my own struggle with applying myself towards a given effort; denying or embracing that which we were made to do.” Another track, “The Ghouls,” concerns…
For quite a while now, The Mountain Goats have established themselves as a sort of thinking person’s indie darlings, combining some stylish music with equally stylish and, at the same time, substantive lyrics. At the same time, they developed their music from a strictly folky, singer-songwriter style to something more detailed and elaborate.
Sticking to such a development line, Through The This Fire Across From Peter Balkan, their latest offering takes another step further. It turns out to be a concept album where John Darnielle, Matt Douglas (the album’s producer here), and Jon Wurster decided to go come in with more detailed musical structures, often with full orchestra backing, without slacking in their constantly excellent lyrics department.
Born and raised in Valldemossa, a picturesque village on the island of Majorca, singer Júlia Colom grew up immersed in a rich tradition of Spanish folk music. The first song she learned, at age six, was The Song of the Sibyl, a medieval chant performed on Christmas Eve. Passed down orally through generations of Majorcans, The Song of the Sybil is long and ornate — a melismatic tune with lyrics that foretell the Apocalypse. Unsurprisingly, it left a lasting impression on Colom.
This musical memory sparked Colom’s passion for singing. Curiosity soon became vocation, and at 18, Colom left Majorca for Barcelona, where she earned a degree in music and expanded her practice into composition and contemporary music. Still deeply connected to her Majorcan heritage,…
DOGA, new studio album by Juana Molina, the eighth full-length of her career and her first album of new compositions in eight years.
For DOGA she has been trying to master the furiously difficult world of analogue synths, hunching over instruments that resemble old-fashioned telephone switchboards to invent sounds that don’t rely on pre-programmed waveforms. She recorded everything she made but became overwhelmed by the hundreds of hours of tape. It prompted her to work with a producer, Emilio Haro, for the first time since her debut. DOGA is deeper and more spacious than its predecessor, with synthesised orchestral touches: the guitars on ‘Miro Todo’ (I See Everything), says Molina, sound like violins that “are somehow out of…
Sam Burchfield’s music rises from the foothills of South Carolina near the Blue Ridge Mountains, where the landscapes shaped his sound and spirit. Now based in North Georgia, he channels the essence of the natural world into Nature Speaks, his latest album, a collection that invites listeners to dive into their own emotional and spiritual depths. Burchfield recorded Nature Speaks in just five days, capturing a raw immediacy that mirrors the album’s intimate themes. He opens with ‘Spirit of the Night,’ a warm and inviting track that immediately pulls listeners into his world. His songwriting radiates openness and honesty, striking a chord that feels both personal and universal.
Tracks like ‘Make Change’ and ‘I Wanna BeClose’ highlight his tender, soulful side,…
The adjective “Waits-ian” (with reference to Tom Waits) is one that is often applied to performers who gruffly operate outside of the musical mainstream and Micah P. Hinson, in his career, is one who might well have been thus categorised with his close mic-ed rich and ragged vocals and sparse, rhythmic instrumentation, typified by the songs on his 2022 release I Lie to You.
With The Tomorrow Man, Hinson takes a musical turn into richer – possibly smoother – territory with the addition of (mainly) orchestral string backing. The opening ‘Oh, Sleepyhead’ has a triumphalist orchestral arrangement, whereas ‘One day I will get my revenge’ wanders more into Father John Misty territory with its reliance on narrative and catchy melody.
This fifth studio album from Admiral Fallow is their first in four years, with at least one track (‘The Shortest Night’) dating back further, to the early days of the pandemic. Clearly, the Glasgow five-piece are the kind of band happy to allow their ideas room to breathe, to crystallise at their own pace, which is something palpable on First of the Birds; the best songs here are stately and refined, unfurling at their own pace.
Opener ‘First Names (Storms)’ is a case in point, as is the stunning ‘Dead in the Water’ along with gorgeous closer ‘All the Distractions’ – all tracks where the sparse, elegant instrumentation provide a foundation for frontman Louis Abbott’s stirring vocals to wash over. Elsewhere, there’s experimentation, with mixed…
One day, will Saintseneca’s new record, Highwallow & Supermoon Songs, do for another worn-down, listless folk musician what painting did for bandleader Zac Little? Toward the end of the 2010s, Little suffered a prolonged period of creative doldrums, thus explaining the seven years or so it took his band to follow up Pillar of Na. Touring and recording and writing and practicing all take a toll; even artists need time to fill their cups, contrary to preconceptions that art is easy and those who make it their vocation are blessed with ever-flowing goblets. (This is very much not the case, for artists as well as for arts and culture critics. We all identify as “tired.”)
It fits that Little plugged into painting to recharge his spirit. Highwallow & Supermoon Songs…
While singer/songwriter Christian Kjellvander certainly has a niche in the angsty, earthy corners of music, his output has traversed the alternately ambling and gritty lo-fi rock of his group Loosegoats, and moody solo fare that touches on dusty Americana, sinewy rock, and spacey balladry. After releasing his eighth solo LP, the dark and more experimental Wild Hxmans, in 2018, he delivered a pair of discontented, confessional sets, About Love and Loving Again (2020) and Hold Your Love Still (2023), the latter of which took on existential, sociopolitical challenges as well those of a romantic nature. Arriving two years later, Ex Voto/The Silent Love is a brooding, even rawer final entry in an unofficial trilogy on love. Originally conceived as a set of sparse…
…Damien Jurado‘s new album, Private Hospital is the fifth and final instalment of his “Reggae Film Star” pentalogy, a series that began in 2023.
On his Substack, Jurado expressed pride in the series but singled out the upcoming album, calling it a “very different album for me.” While the specifics of the album’s new sound have yet to be revealed, Jurado is making a notable shift in how he releases his music.
Private Hospital will be Jurado’s first album released exclusively in book form. He is moving on from traditional formats like vinyl, CDs, and cassettes, citing there are “a myriad of reasons, but environmental being at the top of my list.” In his announcement, Jurado urged fans to research the environmental impact of polyvinyl…
Jared Dustin Griffin’s sophomore album – The Perseverance of Sisyphus – could be seen as dreary yet formidable. It is a brooding rumination on what happened in the past tense and what awaits ahead in the dark and cold days to come. On ‘Shovel,’ Griffin intones in a gravelly baritone: I’ve come through hell to find salvation / I’ve brought a shovel for when I’m done / And I have come to dig my dirt / It’s just the pain that burdens the hurt. This is a soft, wistful track about the end of a relationship, with Griffin’s character wishing he could have done more.
Past comparisons made between Griffin and icons like Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen can be made, but Griffin’s work stands on its own as well. Warm with yearning and steely with…
