Category: Reviews

Album | Bruce Cockburn – O Sun O Moon

There’s an air of playful, potential finality to Bruce Cockburn’s 38th studio album. It’s his first LP proper since 2017’s Bone On Bone, if you don’t include 2019’s instrumental Crowing Ignites. The influential Canadian troubadour may be a cult concern on our…

Album | Shirley Collins – Archangel Hill

Every generation of the Collins family has been carved from the hills of the South Downs, and it is those hills that act as a silent partner and accompaniment for Archangel Hill, the third album that folk queen Shirley Collins…

Album | Hannah Rose Platt – Deathbed Confessions

Ghosts seem to haunt every second of Hannah Rose Platt’s Deathbed Confessions. Inhabiting a widescreen wonderland, Platt creates a landscape filled with both the horror and humor that haunts listeners. Her voice, a surprisingly flexible instrument, shades these recordings in…

Album | Califone – villagers

Residing in a neighborhood where Captain Beefheart and 70s AM radio not only coexist but share the same turntable, Tim Rutili’s band Califone examines the strange landscape of villagers. It is, to say the least, an interesting trip, one where…

Album | Tiny Ruins – Ceremony

Ceremony seems to suggest formality, yet Tiny Ruins new album is far less formal than the title suggests. Hollie Fullbrook wrote the album during walks with her dogs along the turbulent landscape of “Old Murky” – Tāmaki Makaurau’s (aka Auckland’s)…

Album | Arborist – An Endless Sequence of Dead Zeros

“Sometimes these are the best dreams I’ve ever had/Like a sparkle of crystals in the palm of my hand”. From the opening lines of Arborist’s third album, we are welcomed into a world observed from a different angle. Arborist, aka Mark McCambridge,…

Album | Lucy Farrell – We Are Only Sound

Lucy Farrell has been a name on the English folk circuit for a number of years, duetting with Jonny Kearney for a while and gaining acclaim in supporting slots or the likes of The Unthanks and Bellowhead. After winning the…

Album | Esther Rose – Safe to Run

Esther Rose has lived a bit of a nomadic existence, and now living in Santa Fe, after stays in Columbiaville, Michigan; and New Orleans, Safe to Run suggests that trading places has had a certain appeal. It’s as if she…

EP | Angel Olsen – Forever Means

Sometimes things just don’t fit. Angel Olsen had that problem with ‘Nothing’s Free’, the first track from her new EP, Forever Means. Soulful in a way that the other songs on Big Time weren’t, it became obvious it wouldn’t make…