Rapunzel & Sedayne – Songs From The Barley Temple - September 2011 September 26th, 2011

Rachel McCarron and Sean Breadin have already recorded the Pentacle Of Pips album as Venereum Arvum, its abstract drones and dark tones appealing to the sort of neo-folk fans who sell organic vegetables to fund their occult memorabilia collections. Songs From The Barley Temple is a brighter, more welcoming, proposition. Modal, improvisational techniques, Bredin’s exotic…

Elle Osborne – So Slowly, Slowly She Got Up - September 2011 September 20th, 2011

The Mumford And Sons massive aren’t folk musicians, but an evolved acoustic pop outfit in a rustic tweed disguise. Perhaps the Lincolnshire lass Elle Osborne isn’t really a folk musician either, but an avant-garde experimenter using traditional tunes as vehicles for her ragged, ripe visions. Nonetheless, the 19th century Yorkshire singer whose Dalesman’s Litany is…

Richard Youngs – Amplifying Host - September 2011 September 20th, 2011

Imagine Richard Youngs as the junior member of a cabal of prolific and puritanical English musician-mystics, including The Fall’s Mark E Smith, Van der Graaf Generator’s Peter Hammill, Martin Carthy and The Clangers’ composer Vernon Elliot, and still his nature will elude you. Youngs turns his hand once more, on what I think is genuinely…

Tav Falco’s Panther Burns – Lore and Testament Vol 1 : Behind The Magnolia Curtain & Blow Your Top - September 2011 September 18th, 2011

Today’s rockabilly revivalists – Imelda May and Kitty, Daisy and Lewis – revere their sources. But in the late seventies degenerate New Yorkers and track-marked Australians pointed their quiffs at the future, and bled post-punk noise over the music’s bones. This collection of Tav Falco’s early recordings finds the legendary Memphis polymath howling off-key over…

Dawes – Nothing Is Wrong - September 2011 September 18th, 2011

Apparently, Dawes represent a Seventies Laurel Canyon country rock revival. But in today’s musical multi-verse all forgotten genres are available on-line instantly, and Dawes are merely further proof of the simultaneous existence of everything. Sniff their second album, inhale the car fume high, taste the air conditioned freshness, and endure the nostril coke sting. Dawes…

Martin Simpson – Purpose + Grace - September 2011 September 12th, 2011

Thirty-five years into his career, the Lincolnshire folk singer and guitarist Martin Simpson has perfected a professorial fusion of British and American forms. The Sheffield Apprentice’s provenance blurs in a hillbilly hootenanny, a transcript of an archive interview with the Kentucky musician Banjo Bill Cornet arcs around BJ Cole’s swooping pedal steel, and there’s a…