As soon as the first line has been sung on Daniel Pattison’s debut EP The Southern Cross you’ll be aware that Pattison’s is one of the most noteworthy male voices of the last twenty years. It’s a gorgeous voice –…
Watching Johnny Flynn live is a lot like spending the afternoon with your grandma. Take, for example, his confusion when playing a brand new song to ‘more than three people’ for the first time. Upon beginning, a man at the…
Landshapes (formerly Lulu and the Lampshades) are a foursome most well-known for playing on cups in their kitchen. They are raucously fun to see live, playing a dizzying array of instruments (especially percussive ones), and Rambutan is rhythmically and musically…
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…