KLOF Mag Regular + New Folk Show + Album Reviews
New Folk Show plus lots of album reviews...dig in
Many of the tracks featured in our latest Folk Show are from albums that we’ve recently reviewed or featured, including our current Featured Albums of the Month from The Rheingans Sisters and Jon Boden (both also released today). There are also some new releases that have caught our ear but have not quite made it to these pages, which we think you’ll love.
Ft: The Rheingans Sisters, Jon Boden & The Remnant Kings, J.R. Bohannon & Dave Shuford, Jake Blount & Mali Obomsawin, Frankie Archer, Joshua Burnside, Jon Doran, Kate Young, Ewen Henderson, Mairearad Green and Rachel Newton, Bridget & Kitty, Naima Bock, Constant Follower, Luke De-Sciscio, Mike Gangloff & C Joynes, Henry Parker, Shovel Dance Collective, Angeline Morrison, Simon Jones, Three Cane Whale, Julie Fowlis, Kathryn Tickell
Featured Albums of the Month
The Rheingans Sisters – Start Close In
(27th September 2024) Self Released.
There are so many good quotes I could lift from Thomas Blake’s album review, I think even Anna and Rowan Rhaingans were spoilt for choice. In short, I encourage you to read this and all our reviews as our selections are very carefully and lovingly curated.
…The album begins with Devils, an uproarious update of the old English ballad The Devil and the Farmer’s Wife, which in its original state is one of the more misogynist entries into the tradition (it tells of a wife so unbearable that even Satan and his poor imps can’t deal with her). The Rheingans’ take, inspired by Frankie Armstrong’s 1978 version, subverts the narrative, turning it into an anthem of independence. Featuring tambourin à cordes and distorted viola, it begins in dissonance (those John Cale influences are there for all to hear) and works its way up to a stormy, rocky frenzy; the performance has a rawness and a defiance all of its own, and the whole package is steeped in the drama of good storytelling.
Order Start Close In: Bandcamp
Stream Start Close In: https://rheinganssisters.lnk.to/StartCloseIn
Jon Boden & The Remnant Kings – Parlour Ballads
(27th September 2024) Hudson Records
On Danny Deever, Boden takes a Kipling poem from 1890 and turns it into a sprawling ballad. The subject matter is heartrending, and the way Boden’s voice creaks and cracks on the song’s refrain, ‘O they’re hangin’ Danny Deever in the mornin’!’ transcends sentimentality and provides the album with its emotional core. Another high point is Rose of Allendale, one of the few songs on the album that was actually written as a parlour piece. In this case the writer was Charles Jefferys, and he left us with an achingly beautiful love song which found a second life in the 1960s after being preserved in the Copper Family repertoire and finding its way into pubs and folk clubs. It is the perfect example of the cross-pollination between folk and parlour music.
Order/Save: https://hudsonrecords.ffm.to/parlourballads
Before I get into the album reviews, we’ve also featured a lot of new music. Click here to check out some of the premieres, Songs of the Day etc. Including new music from Kathryn Tickell, Steve Knightley, Genticorum, Jack Cookson, Christy Moore, Junior Brother
and Music like this…
Belfast-based folk singer-songwriter Joshua Burnside has signed to the Nettwerk label and releases a double A-Side single. Watch his new video for “Marching Round The Ladies”. Outstanding. Read more.
Other Album Reviews
Since our last newsletter, there have been 25 album reviews…so excuse the length of this one.
Constant Follower – The Smile You Send Out Returns To You
(28th February 2025) Last Night From Glasgow.
This is probably the earliest run album review we’ve ever done. Stephen McAll, better known by his Constant Follower nom de plume, was keen to read what we thought of this album, and Thomas Blake obliged.
Constant Follower is a rare kind of songwriter: an artist inspired by trauma, personal loss and grief whose songs deal honestly with those emotions but are never afraid to offer up a little hope. This was true of last year’s collaboration with Scott William Urquhart, Even Days Dissolve, and it’s even more apparent on The Smile You Send Out Returns To You, his second solo album, where the songs often drift through liminal states before focussing on a bright musical passage or a sharp lyrical phrase.
As was the case on the Urquhart collab, McAll’s songs take inspiration from the literature of landscapes, and in particular, the poetry of Norman MacCaig, with whom he shares a certain kind of heartbroken optimism and a tangible affinity for the topography of his native Scotland. In fact, McAll credits MacCaig’s poetry for helping his recovery after a violent attack two decades ago left him with serious head injuries and long-lasting issues with memory and cognition.
Naima Bock – Below a Massive Dark Land
(27th September 2024) Sub Pop Records.
It’s all about the beautiful and surprising sonic details: the foregrounded vocal at the opening of Takes One splits and fractures into multiple colours, stained glass in song form, while the handclaps that puncture the same song change the mood subtly but completely. And that’s without mentioning the melancholy swath of violin and a folksy section of communal singing. There are so many elements that it’s a wonder they can all work together, but wonder appears to be a common reaction to Bock’s music. That’s because of the risks she takes: the songs on Below a Massive Dark Land play with the idea of structure in such an original way that they end up sounding like everything and nothing else on Earth. It’s an album full of antic juxtapositions and barely recognisable shapes, but it deals with serious themes, and it confirms Naima Bock as a major songwriter.
John Patrick Elliott – My Role in the Show
(6th September 2024) Carbon Moon Records
John Patrick Elliott is a songwriter whose band, The Little Unsaid, make some of the most soul-searching, brutally self-aware music around, so perhaps it shouldn’t be much of a shock to discover that his first solo album, My Role in the Show, is profoundly, intensely personal. Elliott’s great strength as a songwriter – or one of his great strengths, as he has many – is his ability to examine open psychological wounds with precision, clarity and honesty, and in a solo setting, these examinations are brought into even sharper focus.
…He is an expert when it comes to offering up these dualities, making seemingly disharmonious concepts and radically disparate musical ideas work together, and My Role in the Show is the most perfectly realised example of that talent in his distinguished career.
Bridget & Kitty / Resonant Bodies – Betwixt & Between 11
(23 September 2024) Betwixt & Between Tapes
Following on from April’s Nick Granata/Dawn Terry split, Jacken Elswyth’s occasional tape series continues with its eleventh instalment. This one comes courtesy of London-based singing duo Bridget & Kitty and Sheffield free-folk improvisers Resonant Bodies, the live music outlet for Zebedee Budworth (hammered dulcimer and electronics) and Rob Bentall (nyckelharpa and electronics).
…Betwixt & Between is quickly becoming a valuable document of the outer reaches of British experimental folk music. Eleven tapes in, and the quality shows no sign of diminishing. Elswyth has an ear for the most exhilarating and satisfying sounds, and her curation – like her own music – is perfectly pitched.
Luke De-Sciscio – Theo
(27th September 2024) Folk Boy Records
By the time For the Poems arrives, having experienced curiosity, fear and joy, there is a chance for one final glimpse into the future. Gentle fingerpicking frames hopes and dreams for Theo’s future. “In a world that’s found its way/ And is better than today/ Isn’t scared to be okay/ Is okay/ Like today.” Over the course of 11 songs, Luke De-Sciscio tackles the reality of parenthood in a remarkable collection of songs that distils the hopes and fears for an unknown future, what it means to be a father and what it means to be alive in the 21st century.
Jake Blount & Mali Obomsawin – Symbiont
(27th September 2024) Smithsonian Folkways
Embedded in the folk tradition is the process of evolution and re-interpretation, bringing aged material into a new era with fresh perspectives. This is a process that Jake and Mali honour, but they do so without a hint of previous formulas. It is no surprise to learn that they refer to the process as “remixing” for the modernist approach, with tasteful factions of electronica and found sound all carefully applied and making for a cutting-edge experience; this is music that wipes your face and re-awakes the senses. There is nothing so predictable as a linear foundation either; everything washes and splashes between the present, the past, and a future that remains wide open, where the apocalyptic and the utopian appear equally possible. This is a daring album in which the apparently incompatible make for perfect bedfellows. Blount’s background in pioneering Black folk music interpretation and Afrofuturism inspire and are inspired by the free jazz experimentalism from which Obomsawin has risen. You cannot really nail down exactly what this magical fusion of natural beauty, fragility, turbulence and ever-evolving motion really is, let alone where it came from and how it works so wonderfully well. It is awe-inspiring, a ball of chance and wonder, much like the planet Earth itself when you come to think of it.
Kate Young – Umbelliferæ
(27th September 2024) Meaw Records
Scottish singer Kate Young has made a name for herself on the live music circuit with a compelling mixture of a densely compositional musical style and an approach to songwriting that draws on both traditional and experimental methods. With those disparate elements finally coming together in the recording studio, with Umbelliferæ, Young has created an album that bridges the gaps between chamber folk, pop, world music and contemporary composition.
…Young never lets that ambition blind her to the importance of her message or the sheer delight of her songcraft. Umbelliferæ is the work of years: a wise, joyous epic.
Mike Gangloff & C Joynes – Tom Winter, Tom Spring
(23 September 2024) Sonido Polifonico SP044
The mini-album, Tom Winter, Tom Spring, a limited edition 10” lathe press vinyl, is certainly one to snap up, especially considering they’ve only pressed 57 copies (perhaps prepare to resign yourself to the digital version). The record features the talents of two quiet stalwarts on the US and UK instrumental music scenes, American fiddle player Mike Gangloff and British fingerstyle guitar ace C Joynes, two players who have given a huge amount to the genre over the years.
Mike is best known for his work with Pelt and the Black Twig Pickers, where he played with Jack Rose and Nathan Bowles, among others (Mike used to play banjo, but one day told Nathan to learn it because he was switching to fiddle), whereas Joynes is a frequent collaborator, having put out albums with Nick Jonah Davis and The Furlong Bray, although he’s best known for his solo work.
Tom Winter, Tom Spring was recorded on an afternoon in May 2023, midway through the pair’s UK tour, by Sheffield-based guitarist Bobby Lee, and it is ace. Six tracks span just shy of half an hour, and it’s an all-killer release with plenty of fun, upbeat music alongside a healthy dose of weird.
Isik Kural – Moon in Gemini
(6th September 2024) RVNG Intl.
It’s evidently too simple to apply a single label to the whole of Moon in Gemini, and it’s also insufficient to tie it to a single mood or feeling. At times, it is pensive or meditative, but that doesn’t fit consistently: there are too many ideas flying around for that to be the case, too much invention. Quietly and with a distinct emphasis on care, Isik Kural has made one of the year’s most varied and rewarding albums.
Laurence Pike – The Undreamt-of Centre
(6th September 2024) The Leaf Label
Featuring the VOX Sydney Philharmonia Choir, The Undreamt-of Centre was recorded in a nineteenth century Gothic church in Sydney. Even those two words, Gothic church, conjure up a sense of historical fantasy, realm crossings and dark majesty. Pike’s music has always been a way for him to bridge the spiritual and earthly zones. With this outing he enters veiled dimensions while weaving a dramatic dance of survival.
Myles O’Reilly – Music from the Threshold
(2nd September 2024) Self Released
Traumatic events can sometimes change lives in unexpected ways. In Myles O’Reilly’s case, suffering a serious accident and spending over a year in recovery provided a pathway for his discovery of ambient music. Up until that point, his musical output had focussed predominantly on pop and folk idioms (he was once the guiding light in the Brad Pitt-endorsed Irish underground indie-pop act Juno Falls). He is still capable of writing luminous, gem-like folk songs of the highest quality – see 2022’s Cocooning Heart for proof of that – but he has also developed a parallel career as a purveyor of gauzy, dreamlike ambient instrumentals. Music from the Threshold is the latest in a clutch of compositional albums and the most varied and emotionally resonant yet.
Angeline Morrison – OPHELIA
(20th September 2024) Self Released
There are certain kinds of music, certain moods provoked by particular sequences or combinations of sounds, that can swallow up whole afternoons. There are albums that can apparently stop or speed up time, that exist in the hinterlands between dream and wakefulness. Albums that seem to create their own miniature weather systems. OPHELIA is one such album. It conjures a perfect, otherworldly landscape of hauntological folk music and holds your hand like a ghostly child to lead you through that landscape.
J.R. Bohannon & Dave Shuford – Reclined in the Haze
(13th September 2024) Barchan Dune Recordings.
This is a peach of a record from two hard-working veterans who seem to fly just under the radar. Brooklyn-based J.R. Bohannon has been more interested in the pedal steel recently, but both his Recôncavo EP and Dusk LP are excellent releases and show plenty of his prowess as an adept fingerstyle guitarist and experimenter. Dave Shuford, AKA D. Charles Speer, is a founding member of No Neck Blues Band and is very handy with a range of instruments (check out his solo version of Markos’s Cave from the D. Charles Speer album Arghiledes on the Thrill Jockey site). Suffice it to say then that this duo set promises plenty of flexing and a hefty range of styles and techniques…
And it doesn’t disappoint…
Three Cane Whale – Hibernacula
(October 2024) Self Released
Bristol-based trio Three Cane Whale have already established themselves as masters of beautiful, miniature, delicate and complex acoustic instrumental music over the course of five albums. Hibernacula, their sixth, again employ the services of Rob Harbron as producer (Rob also worked on their 2013 album Holts and Hovers and 2019 mini-album 303), this time moving back indoors to record in Bristol’s prized St George’s venue, a space famed for its remarkable acoustics.
The band have always carefully considered the recording location of their albums, with their self-titled debut cut in Redland Parish Church, Bristol and Holts and Hovers in twenty locations across south England and Wales. This sense of place also extends into album titles: Hibernacula means the spots chosen by animals in which to hibernate, a title that leads directly on from Holts and Hovers, itself meaning the nesting places of otters. All of these details epitomise Three Cane Whale’s sound, which is as precise as clockwork and a perfect fit for the natural amplifier that is Bristol St George’s.
Julian Taylor – Pathways
(27th September 2024) Howlin’ Turtle Inc
2020’s The Ridge earned Julian Taylor a Juno award as Solo Artist of the Year, and 2022’s Beyond The Reservoir gained him a second nomination and three for this year’s Canadian Folk Music Awards; now, with Pathways, Julian Taylor ranks alongside fellow Canadian folk music luminaries Bruce Cockburn, Leonard Cohen, Buffy Sainte-Marie and Joni Mitchell. If this is about letting go of burdens, long may he lay down his weary tune.
David Grubb – Circadia
(13th September 2024) Cambrian Records
David Grubb finds musical challenges in unusual places, and on Circadia, he wordlessly depicts our dreamworlds, shining a light on a time when who we are and what we know mysteriously stirs the mind while the body rests.
Also covered
Click the title to read the review
Various Artists – Highlands (ft. Julie Fowlis, Ewen Henderson, Simon Emmerson and more)
Featuring Julie Fowlis, Ewen Henderson, the late Simon Emmerson, and more, the musicianship across Highlands is consistently first-rate, and every song is a complete delight. It’s many sublime moments more than warrants listening to, in or out of the Lush Spa.
Lea Thomas – Cosmos Forever
Lea Thomas’s “Cosmos Forever” follows an expansive and timeless pathway, allowing her to incorporate broader influences while maintaining the essence of what great music is all about.
Hannah Sanders & Ben Savage – In The Dark We Grow
With ‘In The Dark We Grow’, Hannah Sanders & Ben Savage have delivered a brilliant and beguiling album; well-crafted and captivating, it’s one to treasure.
AJ Woods – Hawk Is Listenin’
With a voice that echoes the spirit of Neil Young and a profound connection to the desert southwest of New Mexico, AJ Woods brings a personal touch to his music with Hawk Is Listenin’, a diverse collection of soulful songs that reflect his deep understanding …
Sean Taylor – The End Of The Rainbow
The End Of The Rainbow is one of Sean Taylor’s most impassioned albums; for all the tribulations, he ultimately offers the hope and faith that “the world keeps turning by and by”.
John Spillane – Fíoruisce: The Legend of the Lough
John Spillane’s “Fíoruisce – The Legend of the Lough” is epic storytelling, requiring a scale of ambition that few would contemplate. It sits alongside such fine works as Peter Bellamy’s The Transports and Anaïs Mitchell’s Hadestown.