Category: Records

Album | Kristen Grainger & True North – Fear of Falling Stars

In a world that demands the ability to pigeonhole bands, Kristen Grainger & True North make life difficult. Their album, Fear of Falling Stars doesn’t fit easily into a particular box. Especially since a couple of the songs are sung…

Album | Laura Veirs – Phone Orphans

Laura Veirs’ music has been intensely personal in recent times. 2020’s My Echo? was the sound of her marriage breaking up, while 2022’s Found Light was a reflection, a record about what comes next. But now Veirs, as she reaches…

Album | Amy Hollinrake – Sad Lady Songs Vol. 1

Amy Hollinrake has her feet planted in two worlds. She is an English feminist singer-songwriter combining folklore and mythology with contemporary sounds and instruments that are both contemporary and traditional. Creating a head spinning mix of yesterday and today, Sad…

Album | Ebony Lamb – Ebony Lamb

How do you define who you are? To say Ebony Lamb is a recording artist simply doesn’t do her justice. She’s also a preeminent photographer, whose images of New Zealand’s literary figures and independent music scene gave her a certain…

Album | Dylan LeBlanc – Coyote

A dreamer, a drug dealer, a lover, a man caught up in the hand life has dealt him, desperate to escape. Musicians are storytellers and on his new album, Dylan LeBlanc tells the tale of Coyote, a man drawn from…

Album | Mali Velasquez – I’m Green

I first stumbled upon Mali Velasquez by chance, taken in by her album art. It was a painting of three figures, two adults and a child between them, coloured in the yellows, pinks, and browns of an old family photograph.…

Album | Sufjan Stevens – Javelin

Recently struggling to sleep, I turned to Convocations – Sufjan Stevens’ 2021 49-track instrumental album, written in the wake of his father’s death. I was taken aback by this subtly inventive two-and-a-half hour, five-part song cycle. It came only one…

Album | Martin Simpson & Thomm Jutz – Nothing But Green Willow: The Songs of Mary Sands and Jane Gentry

Fires crackling, a warm breeze tangling through your hair, lush green lands, open plains and rolling hills. Tales of love, death, and empowerment, entwined with morals, warnings, and memories. This is what folk music gifts to us and what listeners…

Album | Modern Nature – No Fixed Point In Space

The music of Jack Cooper’s current band Modern Nature bears little resemblance to the music he made as half of Ultimate Painting. There really is no standard path that leads from there to No Fixed Point In Space. The shift…

Album | Devendra Banhart – Flying Wig

Devendra Banhart is no stranger to anyone who reads these pages. Flying Wig sees the Houston-born musician and songwriter releasing his 11th album into the wild. He is 21 years deep into a recording career and shows no slowing down…