It’s best to start at the end when considering the Wood Brothers’ Smoke Ring Halo, as its final track is breathtaking. ‘Blue and Green’ is crisp, clean, and frankly as close to perfect as I have heard in recent history.…
Category: Reviews
EP | Paul Thomas Saunders – Lilac and Wisteria
I remember seeing Paul Thomas Saunders a couple of years ago in his native Leeds. He was doing the whole emotive-bloke-with-a-guitar routine and, truth be told, he was doing it pretty well. It was with that expectation that I set…
Album | Dennis Hopper Choppers – Be Ready
What an inspired place Tabernas, southern Spain was for writing such a broodingly atmospheric album. Ben Nicholls headed for the land where Sergio Leone shot ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ to pen the songs that would become Be…
Album | Dead Trees – Whatwave
Languid garage rock is the American subgenre that refuses to die. It has endured, barely evolving, since being invented back in the 60s by the Velvet Underground, or maybe the Seeds. Its popularity waxes and wanes, sometimes breaking into the…
Album | William Elliott Whitmore – Field Songs
‘Rootsy’ is a term that gets used a lot in describing that certain kind of Americana that draws heavily on rural country blues, evoking cotton fields and dustbowls. But if it’s actually possible to hear earth, soil, you can hear…
Album | Josienne Clarke – One Light Is Gone
Everything about Josienne Clarke’s music, whether live or recorded, is proper folk. Her debut album One Light Is Gone resolutely champions an authentic acoustic sound and instantly gained heavy rotation on this listener’s daily commute. Josienne’s songs are traditional and…
Album | Marissa Nadler – Marissa Nadler
Marissa Nadler has been perfecting her blend of ethereal beauty for years now and in this, her self-titled latest offering, there’s no massive departure from what’s been before. But that’s by no means a bad thing. Nadler is the epitome…
Live | Sea of Bees @ Portland Arms, Cambridge, 13 July
Sea of Bees, aka Julie Ann Bee, is a musical entity so adorable you want to cuddle her, but her haunting, elegiac melodies leave you in no doubt she’s seen a bit of life – and boy has it hurt sometimes.
Live | Avi Buffalo @ Brudenell, Leeds, 14 July
The ever-sweaty Brudenell Social Club played host to these knob-twiddling, bench-loving, bacon-lipped, monstrously talented Americans, and FFS had a good long look.
Album | Gillian Welch – The Harrow & The Harvest
Mellow, autumnal, amber-shaded moods abound in Gillian Welch’s first full-length release for 8 years. Read our review, and learn all about the letterpress printing of the astonishingly beautiful album cover.