Reviews

If there’s a league for being in lots of bands at once – what does a poor folkie have to do to earn an honest pound? – beside Benji Kirkpatrick and Graeme Taylor, Simon Care’s surely Premiership material; have melodeon will travel. Forming Banter a couple of years back, a positively hopping debut revealed a… Read more »

Well that came out of nowhere, Cave casually let drop the fact that the 17th Bad Seeds album would be released just a few days prior. No grand announcement, just a reply to a fan on his website. And it is so refreshing to actually be surprised, we so easily forget the thrill of discovery… Read more »

Our Reviews Editor, Simon Jones, rounds up some of the albums that escaped our reviewers this month… Head Canon – Thom Ashworth  From download EPs to finally a debut album proper Thom Ashworth is a singer full of ideas and one worth noting is that he plays bass as a lead instrument. Introducing more of… Read more »

It’s been three years since their last release but fans of Show of Hands need wait no longer as ‘Battlefield Dance Floor’ has made its appearance. With thirteen tracks to ponder, the album has the core duo of Steve Knightley and Phil Beer augmented by the almost ever present, Miranda Sykes, as well as Cormac… Read more »

Bit of a slow burner this one. Messrs. Grey and Peach spent August 2018 travelling aboard the Dutch tall ship Wylde Swan, along with filmmaker hamish MacLeod, visiting now uninhabited islands deep in the North Atlantic: The Shiant Isles, North Rona, The Flannan Isles, Sula Sgeir and St Kilda. ‘Ar Iomall’ translates as ‘On The… Read more »

Describing themselves as, “a group of lads that learn and sing traditional sea shanties… and have no aim other than singing well and drinking better”, Duck Pond Sailors have come up with a debut 8-track collection that suggests a true love of singing rather than imbibing….it is rather good. All tracks, with the exception of the… Read more »

Creativity and commerciality are strange bedfellows. Whilst audiences often clamour for more of what they’ve heard in the past, artists are more inclined to look for those sparks of creativity that produce something new. It was such a search that led Marry Waterson and Emily Barker to work together at a songwriting retreat organised by… Read more »

Arguably one of the most quietly effective and successful musicians to come out of the folk revival John Tams remains a man who deals in gritty authenticity not the bucolic cosiness which can often descend when talking about endemic music. Getting as close as any to a truly English rock form, first by pushing the… Read more »

Given to a cavalier spirit and modus operandi that few folk singers could match in the 70s Nic Jones was undoubtedly at the peak of his powers when he recorded the tracks which populate this entry in the long running Topic series reappraising their significant artists. It was his open guitar tunings which made him… Read more »

From the Latin ‘recordari’ meaning to recall or call to mind gives this debut album by Finn Collinson its title. Recorder is one instrument I feel amply qualified to write about having reached a certain standard at junior school! My rendition of ‘Streets of Laredo’ has to be heard to be believed. Mixing traditional and… Read more »