folk music
Carsie Blanton & the Burning Hell, Hare & Hounds, Birmingham review - a fine revolutionary singalong
Guy Oddy
In these times of genocide, illegal invasions and a class war which the ultra-rich are emphatically winning, we clearly need a woman to point out the nonsense that we have just come to accept as the way things are meant to be. That woman is Carsie Blanton.Powered by revolutionary optimism, a guitar and a group of like-minded friends, she has plenty to say about the world – but does so with a sense of hope for the future and a wry smile. Folk, jazz, blues and ragtime songs such as “Rich People”, “Elon Musk” and “Ugly Nasty Commie Bitch” are funny but serious, hip-swinging but thoughtful and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Record Store Day 2025 is this Saturday! At theartsdesk on Vinyl we’ve been playing through exclusive RSD goodies. Check the reviews. Then check head to your local record shop! See you amongst it. I apologise for the lack of current pop, particularly female pop singers, both established and rising. I spent time chasing such material but none arrived. Our RSD Special, then, lacks this tasty sliver of seasoning, but is still extremely tasty. That aside, DIVE IN!THEARTSDESK ON VINYL’S CHOICEST CUT OF RECORD STORE DAY APRIL 2026Robert Plant with Suzi Dian Saving Grace: All That Glitters Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Science on stage is quite the thing at the moment with a revival of Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen opening at Hampstead Theatre next week and Lifeline, a British musical, injected into Southwark Playhouse for a six-week residency.It’ll be interesting to track the difference between the reactions of audiences and the critics as too many journalists dismiss anything beyond a bunsen burner or a percentage calculation as a matter reserved for boffins. Being proudly ignorant of such subjects appears to be on the person spec for a job at the BBC, but the explosion of science-based podcasts and YouTube Read more ...
Tom Carr
José González is one of those musicians who is well known without many recognising it. Until that is, someone plays his most known track “Heartbeats”, which was unavoidable after it released in the early Noughties. Since then, the Swedish solo artist hasn’t pierced through the zeitgeist in quite the same way, but he has been more than successful enough.Born in Gothenburg to Argentine parents who had fled their native country following the coup in the late seventies, González grew up learning the guitar on a steady stream of Latin and folk influences which form the bedrock foundation of his Read more ...
Tim Cumming
With two albums, The Eternal Rocks Beneath and The Pendulum Swing behind her, and tours aplenty to support them (including a recent trek with Suzanne Vega) singer songwriter Katherine Priddy’s third album is keenly anticipated and deftly delivered. These Frightening Machines is a reckoning with forces beyond your control. It was written and recorded as she enters her thirties, and the machinery in the title is her own body and mind’s workings and malfunctions, as well as the machinery of connections and visions, of friendships and passions, of the systems that we are a part of, and that Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Last week I saw Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, a play which behind its pyrotechnic wit affirms that sorrow and calamity can strike chaotically at the heart of any human idyll. At first glance, the programme presented at Kings Place by the ever-resourceful Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto, with Vermont-born folk singer-songwriter Sam Amidon and a quartet from the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, looked rich in time-honoured pastoral pleasures. The launch concert for Kuusisto and Amidon’s new album Willows, on the Platoon label, it featured a string quartet arrangement (by Martin Gerigk) of Vaughan Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHWest Virginia Snake Handler Revival They Shall Take Up the Serpents (Sublime Frequencies)
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Californian producer Ian Brennan walks, loosely speaking, in the footsteps of groundbreaking (and controversial) father and son song collectors, John and Alan Lomax, who, between them, gathered an essential storehouse of American folk music in the early-to-mid-20th Century. Like them, he’s interested in the cultural context of roots music and he’s ranged across the world, from Rwanda to Azerbaijan. His recent 2023 Parchman Prison Read more ...
Ibi Keita
My first listen to Iron & Wine was only last year, when iconic Midwest Emo band American Football released a cover album of their now classic 1999 self-titled album. Keen to hear all of my favourite tracks reincarnated by some seemingly random, and unknown artists, I woke up on its release date to find that their most popular song “Never Meant” was covered by Samuel Beam, aka Iron & Wine. The song is literally a masterpiece, both its original and Beam’s fantastic cover, a triumph in stretching and kneading the track into something new and beautifully haunting.Hen's Teeth is Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Fuck Thatcher, fuck neoliberalism.” After these words from the stage, an audience response. “Fuck Thatcher” echoes the approving shout from the darkness.The performer expressing his views is the Sheffield-based folk-rooted stylist Jim Ghedi. What he’s said has not come out of the blue. There is context. He is introducing “Ah Cud Hew,” a song included on his In the Furrows of Common Place album. He learnt it from Ed Pickford, a County Durham singer and songwriter with a family background in coal mining. The song – “I could hew” – is about the decimation of the coal industry during the Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Bayard Rustin is a fascinating but little-known figure in US history: a civil rights organiser who worked behind the scenes on both the Montgomery bus boycott and Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington, as well as campaigning for pacifism (he was on the British anti-nuclear Aldermaston March in 1958) and gay rights. He was also an accomplished singer and lutenist, and advocate for Elizabethan song repertoire. An unlikely but intriguing combination, and one that was at the heart of yesterday’s Night Shift concert by personnel from the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment at the Blues Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The Weaving is an Ango-Irish trio of accordion, voice, fiddle and piano. The voice belongs to Méabh Begley, from Kerry’s prominent musical family – she sings one of her father Séamus Begley’s songs, “Dán Lae Breithe”, further in this superb debut set of 12 songs and tunes. Cáit Ní Riain from Tipperary is on piano, and the fiddle player is Leeds-born Owen Spafford, of the acclaimed British folk-ambient duo Spafford Campbell, whose second album, Tomorrow Held, on Real World, was my album of the year in 2025.Owen Spafford describes Warp and Weft (Dlúth & Inneach) as “a cultural Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
According to the fifth song on their first Christmas album, seasonal shenanigans in Old Crow Medicine Show’s family are boozy and raucous. Step aside Santa because “Grandpappy's been a-brewing since before the war” and is “the best bootlegger for a Georgia mile”. The result is the riotous barndance fiddlin’ of “Corn Whiskey Christmas” (which brings “good cheer to all the gals and the fellas). I’m in!The song is a highlight of OCMS XMAS, a 13-track set which showcases the light-hearted side of a Nashville outfit who’ve been at the forefront of the US bluegrass revival for over two decades. Read more ...