London is so hot right now. Seriously, it’s stifling. What you need is some perfect summer folk pop, right? How about local boys and girls Bard and their debut album The Springtime Fool? This is beautiful summery stuff, with tunes…
Category: Reviews
Listen | Dark Dark Dark’s ‘How It Went Down’
Two years on from the beautiful Wild Go, Dark Dark Dark will return in October with their third full-length albm Who Needs Who. Since we last heard from them, singer Nona Marie Invie and the band’s co-founder Marshall LaCount have…
Singles Round-up | James Yorkston, Kyla La Grange, Cellophane Flowers, Shambles Miller
James Yorkston- Border Song James Yorkston may be a folk musician but on this song he shows his early punk background. The words spill out as fast as he can manage to spit them. This isn’t pastoral folk, this is…
Album | The Big Eyes Family Players & Friends – Folk Songs II
Much of what we welcome under the banner of folk music would have rejected the tag in the not-too-distant past, preferring instead to go by acoustic or indie or nu-something-or-other. The Big Eyes Family Players, though, are folk through and…
Compilation | Just Tell Me That You Want Me – A Fleetwood Mac Tribute
For a band with such an inspirational back catalogue, it is a crying shame that many of the young generations would not know ‘Tusk’ or ‘Go Your Own Way’ unless it appeared on an episode of Glee or Geordie Shore…
Will Oldham – An Appreciation
The word ‘legend’ is rarely as acutely appropriate to a musician as it is to Will Oldham. It is so useful not because of stature, but because of mythologizing, because of the whole hagiography, the deifying of the thing. In…
Album | James Yorkston – I Was A Cat From A Book
James Yorkston seems to be releasing music and gigging all the time, but this is actually his first self-penned record since ‘When the Haar Rolls In’ four years ago. From the first note, you realise how much you’ve missed him.…
Festivals | Friday at the Cambridge Folk Festival
The Cambridge Folk Festival is officially the most chilled out festival we’ve ever been to, and certainly the only one where the entire crowd at the main stage sit down in the chairs they’ve brought themselves. With easy access, friendly…
Festivals | Thursday at the Cambridge Folk Festival
The Cambridge Folk Festival is not renowned for its sexiness. Beards? Yes. Beer bellies? Check. Family fun, funny hats and frolics in the mud. But sexiness? Not so much. So imagine my surprise when I arrived on Thursday afternoon to…
Album | The Unthanks with Brighouse and Rastrick Brass Band – Diversions vol. 2
The band is incredibly versatile, from march music offset with sparse, mournful arrangements on the beautiful ‘Trimdon Grange Explosion’, to near classical arrangements on the Prokofiev-reminiscent ‘My Lagan Love’ and the James Bond pyrotechnics in the new rendition of ‘Queen of Hearts’. In its tones and timbre, every track is as reassuringly traditional as logs on a fireplace, but they crackle with a new wit in combinations that, without contradiction, show British folk – and brass band music – at its most innovative.