Fondly known as one of the hardest working duos in the folk music world, John Spiers and Jon Boden were the hit of this year’s Cambridge Folk Festival. Their bombastic 11-piece big band Bellowhead played a storming set in the main…
Category: Reviews
Live | Treetop Flyers @ Hoxton Bar and Kitchen
Treetop Flyers are in many ways the quintessential band to have emerged from the collaborative Communion stable, and their old-time country courts ever increasing attention and buzz. At the launch of not-so-new single ‘It’s About Time’, the band that seems…
Festival | Bestival 2011
Sparky electro-pop and dance were more dominant than folk at this year’s Bestival, but it’s a cheerful mish-mash where sensitive strumming acts are welcomed (as long as they’re not upset by a soft background thud of drum and bass, as…
Album | Laura Marling – A Creature I Don’t Know
If Alas I Cannot Swim was Marling vs Fink and I Speak Because I Can was Marling vs Mumford, on A Creature I Don’t Know Laura strikes out on her own. This album doesn’t look to its contemporaries for influence…
Live | Rufus and Loudon Wainwright at the Royal Opera House
Central to the Royal Opera House’s opulent setting, three words oversee the gilded balconies and small red aisles. HOUSE OF RUFUS. They refer only in part to the similarly-titled nineteen-disc boxset Rufus Wainwright released earlier this month, but more than…
Album | Cocos Lovers – Elephant Lands
Recorded in a converted caravan in Kent, music has never sounded so wholesome. Made up of families and friends, the band’s camaraderie is woven through each song. And listening to Elephant Lands you feel like you’re being let into the club.
Album | Musikanto – Sky of Dresses
Chicago’s Mike ‘Musikanto’ is creating something of a ripple. Music writers are drawing similarities between his intimate, delicate, songs and the work of such greats as Ryan Adams, Van Morrison and the deity that is Bob Dylan. Well, in the…
Album | Widowspeak – Widowspeak
Widowspeak may have a death-laden name, but the opening track on their eponymous debut, ‘Puritan’, is one of the sunniest songs on the album, with a surfing edge and casually sweet vocals, so that the grungy guitar of ‘Harsh Realm’…
Album | Jonathan Wilson – Gentle Spirit
Jonathan Wilson is clearly someone who appreciates that there’s a lot wrong with the world today. Gentle Spirit is, in his own words, an attempt to “give humanity some kind of reverence-laden soundtrack”. The North Carolinian shouldn’t be derided for…
EP | Grace Petrie – When No One’s Listening
Grace Petrie first came to my attention when she stole the stage at Glastonbury’s Left Field in 2010 from Frank Turner and Billy Bragg. She is clearly a big fan of Bragg and follows his habit of mixing pop and…