Whilst writing The Violence, last year’s dazzling musical chronicle of the Essex witch-hunts, Darren Hayman researched and adapted a repertoire of folk songs from the civil war period. On Bugbears he has kitted them out and sent them to march,…
With this album created from stories and poems penned during a grand road trip across the United States, Caroline Rose has not held back in terms of her views on contemporary America she gathered along the way. The songs of…
Okay, let’s get this out of the way straight off the bat: this is not a folk album, and I’m not quite sure why it’s been sent our way. I’m delighted it has, though, as it is a worthy follow-up…
Ever the eccentric, it almost seems on this occasion as though Russell has set out to collate the least appealing set of words ever to appear on an album cover. Long-term devotees will not be put off, though, and nor…
We remember when these four were barely out of short trousers, playing teensy tiny gigs in the backrooms of West London pubs and getting confused about shorthand. Now look at them, kicking Michael Bublé off the number one spot in…
Dear River, the fourth album by Emily Barker & The Red Clay Halo (EB&TRCH) and their first for Linn Records, is that rarest of records: an instant classic. With not a gram of filler, it’s the kind of album that…
If there has been a quiet revolution in folk music in the last maybe three years – and I do not claim for a second that folk music could do a revolution quietly – it’s the re-emergence of close harmony…
Jay Chakravorty is the man behind Cajita and, following support from the likes of Tom Robinson on 6 Music, the multi-instrumentalist is releasing his debut LP, Tiny Ghosts. Combining acoustic guitar, sweeping electronica and touching string arrangements, this is minimalist…
London’s Harry Mundy is far from alone among English musicians who look across the Atlantic for their inspiration, but the story behind his debut album Colour Myself Back In seems to be one of those too-good-to-be-true tales from a land…
It is said that many years ago in the village of Keston, in the London Borough of Bromley, the local cobbler would spend the evenings playing his fiddle to the raucous village rabble. The music he played was so foot-stomping…