Back catalogue: Folk/Americana

Review: "A document created in the shadow of incredible darkness. One from which the creator hadn't planned on escaping and still doesn't. Hence the title of the album. It is the result of an illness that I've battled my whole life. It isn't something that the world has done to me. It's the world I live in, and it's no one's fault."
So says Brian Christinzio, AKA BC Camplight, of his sixth album. As ever, it's a musical masterpiece packing dense layers of instrumental experimentation and theses-worthy lyrical poignance. An artist who has never played by the musical rules, fans of strong juxtapositions will again be in there element, with a tracklist that spans grunge-y garage rock, twisted barroom journeyman stuff, theatrical guitar pop, and plenty more. But the sounds themselves are only one half the genius. When it comes to arrangements, things are as playful as they are innovative, keeping listeners guessing as to how structures will pan out.

Review: It's almost unfathomable more people haven't heard of Beau. Without question one to the finest living (recording) musicians on the face of the planet, the guitar master has been putting albums out since (drum roll) 1969, with his most recent, The Methadone of Our Time, arriving in 2021. The Leeds-born folk and folktronica legend's work rate is so high, in fact, that he regularly delivers more than one LP in a year, with 2013 among the bumper calendars in which he managed to bestow no less than six full-length-ers on fans.

Beau takes us right back to where it all began. Well, almost. Recorded in 1969, and hitting shelves just after his debut 1917 Revolution, it has aged fantastically well, much like the artist himself. A spellbinding showcase of his twelve-string guitar playing, it may have been very much of its time, but this is one few could argue fails on the timelessness test.

Review: Hadsel is a first full length record since Beirut dropped their 2019 work Gallipoli. It is the first on Zach Condon's own Pompeii Records label and was recorded on the Norwegian album from which it takes its name. Condon had to cancel a tour in 2019 to focus on getting well after a breakdown and used the process to recover after growing issues around self doubt. The beautiful songs reflect the vulnerability of the artists with gorgeous melodies and layers of subtly rousing chords, supple rhythms and great contrast between light and dark.

Review: Hadsel, Zach Condon AKA Beirut's first album in four years, is named in honour of the place in which much of it was recorded, a remote Norwegian island that the neo-folk artist stayed in back in 2019. The tranquillity of his surroundings, as well as access to limited instruments (a lo-fi drum machine, a church organ, a basic synthesiser and his trusty acoustic guitar, is reflected in the beauty and slow-burn nature of the music on show, which naturally pushes Condon's distinctive, emotionally charged vocals to the fore and tends towards the atmospheric and musically opaque. The results are genuinely beguiling, with our picks of a very strong bunch including 'The Tern', where Condon's voice sails above sustained organ chords, a tribal-tinged rhythm track, and life-affirming vocal harmonies, and the brass-enhanced warmth of 'So Many Plans'.

Review: Once nominated for the GRAMMY for 'Best Traditional Blues Album', blues and roots legend Eric Bibb delivers a brand new live album to the world, Live At The Scala Theatre, Stockholm, under license from Repute Records. Live at The Scala Theatre contains a selection of songs cherry-picked from Bibb's towering history as a musician, infused with the folk and blues tradition with more contemporary sensibilities. "Without a doubt," says Bibb, The Live at The Scala concert was "the most ambitious gig and recording project of my career." The performance features an all-star lineup of musicians including Eric's longtime collaborator, musical director and producer Glen Scott on bass, keys, drums and backing vocals; Olle Linder on drums and acoustic bass; Johan Lindstrom on pedal steel and electric guitar; Christer Lyssarides on electric guitar and mandola; we could go on.

Review: Diane Birch returns with that spellbinding voice - a transportive powerhouse packing a timeless quality that resonates through her music. The American recording world doing what it has always done so well, creating huge, heartbreaking, hopeful, and captivating mini operas disguised as pop. Or, if you want to get technical here: soft rock, country, folk, r&b and soul. OK, so there are elements of funk and jazz, too, and the result is a heady brew that's pretty inescapable. Harking back to the balladry heydays, with shades of Dolly Parton, Whitney Houston, and Carly Simon, to name but a few - in delivery and performance, if not necessarily tone - no matter where you're listening from it's going to be hard to forget this one.

Review: Sweden has so much to answer for in non-conformist music terms. And Gothenburg is responsible for plenty within that. Take Gustaf Dicksson's renowned Blod project, for example, and its formidable 2023 outing Ondskans Fro. As oppose to the preceding two albums, here we find the man in question flying solo on the mic having previously partnered with fair-voiced female vocalists, lending the record a sense not just of the personal and intimate, but solitary isolation. That may sound slightly sombre, but it shouldn't. In reality, while we often jump to miserable conclusions when we think of words like 'alone', there's no greater strength than our ability to be happy as individuals - self love being a prerequisite to loving anyone else. In many ways, that's a resounding takeaway here. Medieval ambient folk that is warm, inviting, peaceful, and often dreamy.

Review: Copenhagen-based Jason Dungan, aka Blue Lake arrives on Tonal Union with a stunning album built around inquisitive approaches to zithers, drones, clarinets, slide guitar and drum machines. It's a pastoral record first and foremost, but it's not bound by musical tradition and instead uses the impetus of post rock as a motivation to explore expressive, evocative spaces through composition and instrumentation. There are countless moments of shimmering beauty scattered throughout this vibrant album, which respond to the time he spent isolated in a remote part of Sweden while crafting the bulk of the music.

Review: It's always nice when an album comes with a backstory so genuinely absurd it renders the project a surrealist work of art. Welcome to "I Made A Place", the first fresh material from Bonnie "Prince" Billy in time, dedicated to life's simple and most instinctive pleasures. Because in the face of real adversity overthinking is wasting time. So here's the yarn - Hawaii, January 2018, Will and Elsa, the creatives at work here, are in the midst of an artistic residency when a warning goes off about an impending missile attack. A song is written, "Blueberry Jam"; whimsical flight of fancy laughing in the face of impending Armageddon. Thankfully the "attack" was a false alarm, but it catalysed further work resulting in this album. Complex song craft and enchanting folk instrumentation rooted in what we feel when all is about to be lost.

Review: Bonnie "Prince" Billy (Will Oldham) is a folk artist of towering stature, so the news of a new album in 2023 was nothing if not a "stop what you're doing" moment. Now coming to full-length LP format for the first time, after an initial CD and digital release, Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You hears Billy revive the spirit of folk music's roots in community and place, conjuring the wise memories of his past and fusing them with the anxieties of his present day. An all-acoustic, all-emotive album, Oldham makes constant reference to his family and people, getting at the real impossibility of divorcing oneself from community, despite the myths to the contrary peddled by merchants of the American dream.

Review: Lo Borges arrived in 1972 as the debut solo album for Brazilian songwriter Lo Borges. He was recording Clube da Esquina with the legendary Milton Nascimento and Beto Guedes in the same year and there are plenty of shades of that alaric here. It's a record with lush texture and lots of superbly intricate guitar playing that brings the heat and transports you to a scorched earth world in South America. The vocal arrangements are lush, too, with lots of confounding instrumentals and clever progressions that you will enjoy trying to unpick. Add in melodic brass and jazzy organs and you have a real pearler.

Review: Country and folk fans alike take heed - Muireann Bradley is a startling new talent in country and bluegrass from County Donegal in Ireland. I Kept These Old Blues absolutely calls back to a golden age of Americana, but Bradley's Irish lilt comes through and entwines with her faithful Southern twang to make for an endlessly charming end result. Her playing is pitch-perfect, stripped to the bone finger-picking all the better to savour the songs and the way they're sung. Don't sleep on this limited coloured vinyl edition of this rough diamond of an album.

Review: The 40th anniversary of the start-point of the career of Billy Bragg, British singer-songwriter and activist whose music's stark sociopolitical conscience has gripped fans and protesters alike since 1983. While the original box set contains 14 CDs with more than 300 songs - including each of his 12 studio albums, non-album singles and B-sides, session tracks, rare live recordings, collaborations and previously unreleased material - this version comes pressed on orange vinyl and distills 40 years of music down to just 13 tracks!

Review: Appalachian style old-time banjo and guitar player Nora Brown joins with award winning fiddler Stephanie Coleman (of Uncle Earl) to present their new EP, 'Lady Of The Lake', featuring two tight-harmony songs and two instrumental duets. Brought together by Brooklyn's tight-knit old-time music community, Brown and Coleman share a rich musical partnership; Nora is a singer and banjo player, while Stephanie is an award-winning old-time fiddler. 'Lady Of The Lake' is the first time Nora and Stephanie have recorded together since Nora's 2019 debut album Cinnamon Tree; the EP comes in four short movements, beginning with an instrumental congregative ballad in the title track, while moving into the steady movements of 'Gone So Long', on which Brown and Coleman duet and harmonise with ease, and into 'Copper Kettle', a more ruminative meditation on the North-Eastern domestic; jugs filling, whiskey-crafting, pales sloshing and lying supine by junipers.

Review: It's difficult to understate the originality running through everything Tim Buckley wrote, played, and sang. Tragically invited to join the 28 club back in 1975, in the nine years he was actively recording and touring he offered some of the most forward thinking folk music of that time. Which, considering just how busy that scene was then, is certainly saying something. Goodbye & Hello is an archetypal example, because in many ways it feels so anarchic.Yes, this is definitely a product of its day, but in the best possible way. Sending ferocious rock 'n' roll crescendos crashing into country-hued journeyman stuff, traditional folk, jazz, psychedelia and so much more. A testament to just how fertile the decade was, it's remarkable that today his name is often only referenced by the most devoted music historians and back catalogue diggers. So, if you're new here, this is an introduction you should not turn down.

Review: It was probably easy to come up with a catchier title for this collection of treasured recordings from one of the 20th Century's greatest lost talents. But like everything Buckley and music, ease isn't really part of the story, that is unless you're referencing the pure bliss of listening to this legend's voice, which is as easy on the ear as you could ask for.

Comprising tracks that were originally captured for broadcast, they reveal the very essence of what Buckley was about. Heartfelt, open-veined songs that grasp the human condition in astute swoops, by this point in his career the folk and Americana signatures had merged with jazz and abstract elements, presenting an image of a restless artist determined to keep exploring. It's been said before, but we will reiterate; had it not been for the tragic overdose a year after the OGWT recording featured here, we can only imagine where his oeuvre would have ended up.

Review: This cult album by Vashti Bunyan was first produced by Joe Boyd for Witchseason Productions. It originally came on Philips in 1970 and along the way, guest features include Fairport Convention's Simon Nicol and Dave Swarbrick as well as Eoin Williams from the Incredible String Band. Songs are about a time in her life when Vashti and her lover travelled by horse and cart to join with an artistic community in the Hebrides. Amusingly, by the time they arrived, the community had all left. A 2008 film tells the tale while this album provides the soundtrack.

Review: Following the amazing success story of Vashti Bunyan's recent re-emergence as an artist after an exile of over 30 years, we are proud and excited to release "Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind", a comprehensive compilation of early recordings dating from the period prior to Vashti's classic "Just another Diamond Day" album which was originally released 1970. Titled after Vashti's (Jagger/Richards-penned) debut single which opens the compilation, this double-album represents an attempt to both open out and draw a line under the past, and also to try to set the record straight about the disparity between how Vashti viewed (and still views) herself against the way she has been popularly perceived. Widely construed as a folk singer - a tag she fundamentally disagrees with - these recordings instead reveal Vashti as a pop singer, however 'fragile' and unique. A complete collection of Vashti's existing early recordings, the album is divided across two discs and features 25 tracks - mostly rescued from a number of old acetates and quarter-inch tapes Vashti's brother John had found in his attic a few years ago.

Review: It's October 2020 and two Bills decide to do a cover version of the 1967 Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens) protest track 'Blackness of the Night'. A fitting choice given at the time the world was stuck in a strange recurring nightmare, defined by confusion, isolation, and pessimism, the track was not only appropriate, it was wonderfully re-read by the artists bringing it into the present day.

And they didn't stop there. Soon, there were more new versions of old greats coming from the pair, and the smart money was always on an album arriving at some point in the future. Well, that point is now, and finally we have it. Better yet, this is every bit as lovely as we could have hoped. Combining elements of pop, folk, blues, country, gospel, and rock, it's accomplished, sophisticated, and hugely enjoyable.