As you might expect from a group as interesting as The Unthanks, Diversions is not a straight covers album. Rather it is a re-imagining, a project in its own right, comparable to many other ‘versions’ projects that have emerged from…
Author: For Folk's Sake
Album | Dan Mangan – Oh Fortune
“Please be merry, when I am buried/In the ground”. Despite recently playing for Kate n’ Wills in his native Canada, FFS favourite Dan Mangan seems a bit glum right now. Moving on from the flimsier topics (robot love and that)…
Album | Extra Classic – Your Light Like White Lightning, Your Light Like A Laser Beam
Extra Classic hail from home-of-counterculture San Francisco. Some of the six band members have previously played with The Papercuts and Casiotone For The Painfully Alone, and as recently as 2007 were supporting Modest Mouse and Conor Oberst. So far, so…
Live | Josh T. Pearson @ The Barbican + a free Christmas download
Josh T. Pearson’s Last of the Country Gentlemen was released this year to widespread acclaim, with this very website describing it as a ‘sparse, delicate and unrelenting trawl through the darker recesses of the soul’. It has found itself in…
Singles Round-up | We Are Augustines, Mozart Parties, Vadoinmessico, The Twilight Sad, Sam Brookes and First Aid Kit
We Are Augustines – Book of James This reminds me of the emotional fervour of Mumford & Sons with less righteousness, more of an incantation than a battlecry. Inspired by family and loss, it’s a eulogy to lead singer Billy…
EP | The Lost Cavalry – Snow City Radio
What sort of songs would you like on your car radio in Snow City? Assuming everything in Snow City is covered in snow, like some Christmas film vision of New York and that I get to wear one of those…
EP | Darren Hayman – Christmas In Haworth
The Christmas album comes with all sorts of pitfalls in which to fall headfirst or to stand in proudly, arms akimbo. Even the most earnest of performers can put out some jingly-jangly tune to suit the season of merriment. But…
Album | Vanessa Peters – The Christmas We Hoped For
At a time when every Tom, Dick and Harry are releasing a Christmas album (Tom, Dick and Harry probably being Michael Bublé, The Smurfs and Cliff Richard), it’s great to see the folk community getting in on the action this…
Album | Emmy The Great & Tim Wheeler – This Is Christmas
In a year with more full-length festive offerings than any in recent memory, there has still been something essentially ‘Christmassy’ missing. She & Him provided the Midnight Mass feeling – respectful, stately, something you can be sure your Gran will…
EP | Daughter – The Wild Youth
To say it’s been a busy year for Daughter would be a massive understatement. The release of The Wild Youth EP is her third release in a year (the first, a collection of demos may not be recognised as ‘official’,…