Filigree-wearing femmes, gun-toters and life stories in three minutes are staples of country music that FFS adores, and Alela Diane’s third studio album has served to deepen our adoration. As if we needed any help. Her rich, clear vocals are like…
Author: Helen
Helen is Folk's Sake's Live Editor. She loves many things, including: cookbooks, massive novels, Kings of Convenience, Beirut, Kristin Hersh, Dolly Parton, Willy Mason, St Vincent, The Divine Comedy, Mumford and Sons, The Carpenters, Cocorosie, Eels, Belle and Sebastian, Martha Wainwright, Joanna Newsom and The Smiths.
Album: tUnE yArDs – w h o k i l l
Perpetual messers-with word cases tUnE yArDs keep their incessant meddling up with this, their second studio album. The powerhouse driving the tUnE yArDs project, Merrill Garbus, has succeeded in giving us an innovative, playful, and staggeringly adept follow-up to the…
Live: Decemberists @ Hammersmith Apollo, 15/03/11
If you often feel that time passes too slowly and you’d like, more than anything, to hurry yourself towards death, you need to see The Decemberists live on as regular a basis as finance and geography permit. They have the…
Album: Firefly – Lightships
Sometimes you want music that’s happy in the background: tunes and rhythms into which you can snuggle down, safe and sound and comforted. This kind of music is highly necessary and vitally important to day-to-day life. Firefly do not make…
Tour: Tristram & Laish
It’s no secret that FFS are stonking great big fans of Tristram. Of course we are. The man makes the most heart-searing noises with his bare mouth. We liked his ‘Someone Told Me a Poem’ EP so much we raved…
Album: The Flowing – Garden of England
Every now and again it comes to pass that an album shuffles its way sideways into your collection and sets up camp in your consciousness without so much as a ‘by your leave’. Suddenly you’re singing along to songs you…
Blog: Helen’s Album Round-up 2010
When I was an undergraduate we would sometimes play the ‘would you rather…’ game. Andy and Maggie play it in Extras (‘Would you rather be a penguin who’s a bird but can’t fly or a flying fish that’s a fish…
Album: Eels – Tomorrow Morning
Being a devoted Eels fan can be pretty hard on the heart. The bitter, lonesome, near-despairing End Times was the eighth album in Mark Oliver Everett’s discography, and bore witness to the tearing of sinew and bone that comes at…
Live: Mountain Goats @ Koko, 09/09/10
A man with clunky glasses, turned up jeans, bare feet and a nice bottle of Chablis isn’t everyone’s idea of a god. In fact, it’s not a far cry from most people’s idea of Elton John. Nonetheless, just such a…
Mountain Goats @ Koko 09/09/10 TICKETS STILL AVAILABLE
We love the Mountain Goats. So much they make our knees quiver and our hearts sing. They’re so especially wonderful that Emmy the Great occasionally can’t speak when in their presence (see evidence here). They write songs with wit and…