Findlay Napier & Gillian Frame with Mike Vass: The Ledger
The Ledger comes as a very welcome collection of brilliant rays of musical sunshine, guaranteed to brighten up your day and bring both smiles to faces and warmth to hearts…A genuinely fascinating project, the inspiration for what is in effect the epitome of a high-class traditional folk song album came from a ledger kept by Findlay Napier’s grandfather, Findlay Cumming.
The Ledger is a traditional folk song album par-excellence and a work of great distinction, demonstrating the vital and healthy state of music today. It can be highly recommended, not only to those who are lovers of this genre, but to anyone who appreciates top-quality music delivered by very fine musicians.
Fishclaw: Monmouth’s Twelve
This band operates in a kind of shadow-world, a Lynchian dream of folk music where the old and the new are not as easily delineated as you might think. Monmouth’s Twelve, whose recording began in a conventional manner but was completed remotely during the early stages of lockdown, explores the darkest and roughest edges of traditional music – with all its duality and openness for reinterpretation – in the most innovative of ways.
There is an open-ended quality to much of the music on Monmouth’s Twelve that reflects the creative freedom the band allow themselves and also hints that they will be willing to expand their palette even further in the future. It’s a thrilling prospect: on this evidence they are already one of the most exciting and original bands currently working within the loose framework of folk music.
Garefowl: Cliffs
This was an ambitious project to put together, even more so to attempt it during 2020’s lockdown. All the contributors to Cliffs deserve our thanks and congratulations. They have produced music that effortlessly evokes the sights and sounds of the remote, rocky, seabird havens that make up the St Kilda archipelago.
They’ve then packaged it with artwork and an explanatory booklet that completes a truly satisfying album. I’ve stood on the shore on North Uist looking out to sea in the direction of St Kilda, just that 40 miles or so of sea between us. I never expected to make the trip, but this album has given me a mighty big incentive to try.
Georgia Ruth: Mai
Mai is an intimate collection comprising eight songs and three instrumental pieces that were “written from within the depths of a house, during stolen moments, of stories woven around new motherhood, the search for ritual and about being lost and being found again”. Together they form “an exquisite exploration of the natural world, life cycles, of finding hope in the renewal of the seasons, a search for wildness and love”. The Welsh Calan Mai (Mayday) tradition figures large in this collection, where constant subtle references reflect Georgia’s interest in the idea of a struggle between summer and winter, and in particular now that global warming has muddied the seasons. This feeling of seasonal confusion and (in the mind of the listener) almost disbelief gives a potent, waking-dream-like ambience to the album, as Georgia configures both modern and traditional soundscapes into an altogether intriguing and often surprising musical experience.
Gigspanner Big Band: Natural Invention
The Gigspanner Big Band draws its inspiration and its members from the four corners of the folk music world. Originally a trio, with Knight’s fiddle accompanied by percussionist Sacha Trochet and guitarist Roger Flack, they expanded in 2016 to include contemporary folk duo Phillip Henry and Hannah Martin (better known as Edgelarks) and former Bellowhead melodeon maestro John Spiers.
The Big Band started out as a live concern (and live performance certainly suited their improvisational qualities), but for Natural Invention they have moved into the studio for the first time. Thankfully, the album perfectly captures the sparkle of their musicianship and the intimacy of their collaboration.
Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that Peter Knight has released a piece of music that feels thrillingly, frighteningly, beautifully of our time. He is after all contemporary to the core, and with the Gigspanner Big Band, he has assembled a group of musicians intent on making some of the most important and exhilarating art ever to sit under the banner of folk music.
Gwenifer Raymond: Strange Lights over Garth Mountain
Welsh-born fingerstyle guitar devotee Gwenifer Raymond‘s second album contains five tracks less than You Never Were Much of a Dancer, over pretty much the same running time. This is significant because it gives each longer piece (most are around six or seven minutes) space to breathe and Gwen time to flex and explore. Although You Never Were Much of a Dancer was an accomplished debut, it still felt like Gwen was demonstrating her skills and doffing her cap to the players who helped influence and shape her sound. Strange Lights feels like a huge leap forward; every note sounds original and creative.
Herman Dune: Notes from Vinegar Hill
Herman Dune has always been difficult to pin down. Is it a band or a solo project? A confessional songwriter or an invented character? Anti-folk or classic rock? It’s possible to be all of these things at once, particularly in a place as multifaceted as LA and in a time as fragmented as the one we are living through. And the breadth and variety of Notes From Vinegar Hill suggest that David Ivar has succeeded: he has made a record that sounds on first listen like it could have been recorded at any point in the last fifty years, but in reality is uniquely and intelligently current, an album of the year in every sense.
iyatraQuartet: Break the Dawn
…Theirs is a thrillingly cosmopolitan, well-travelled brand of roots music, with influences ranging from the Carnatic tradition of southern India to western pop music, via Cuban dance rhythms and various other folk traditions from England to the Middle East. It is all tied together by brilliant musicianship and founded on a solid neo-classical bedrock.
And in the end, this exquisite album is all about connections, explicitly the connections between cultures and places that allow music like this to be created. But also – and this is more important right now – connections between individuals: between the musicians in the group, and out to the listeners. iyatraQuartet’s music is a timely reminder of that all-important link between people and their art, and Break The Dawn exists as a complex, stunningly-performed artefact that offers a little hope in dark times.
Jack Sharp: Good Times Older
In his day job as the frontman of Wolf People, Jack Sharp has spent the last decade creating a back catalogue that sits somewhere in the middle of a mystic triangle created by Fairport Convention, Jethro Tull and Black Sabbath. While Wolf People’s output has grown progressively heavier and more psychedelic over the course of four albums (as well as more conceptual – 2016’s Ruins imagines a world without human life), Sharp’s work as a solo artist remains staunchly rooted in the folk music of the British Isles. But while the songs are often from traditional sources, the results are every bit as unique as his full-band psych-rock freakouts.
Good Times Older is a winner for a number of reasons: it does the difficult things well and makes them look easy, it delves into the less well-known corners of British and Irish music and emerges with handfuls of rough-cut gems, but most importantly it gives us some idea of just how gifted Jack Sharp is as a singer and interpreter of song. We can only hope that his foray into the world of traditional music continues.
Jacqui McShee & Kevin Dempsey: From There To Here
When I heard about Jacqui McShee and Kevin Dempsey as a duo, I kind of took a step back and tried to work out if it was a new thing. Or if they have been a partnership since the dawn of folk. While the former is true, it feels much more like the latter, such is the coherence and synchronicity on display in this stylish collection.
…the highlight of the album is a version of Ribbon Bow (the very first Fairport Convention single released as ‘If I had a Ribbon Bow’). Much slower and statelier than Fairport’s, this version leans much more on the Odetta take, revealing the anguish at its core. It’s a showcase for everything that’s right about this album: two artists at their very best taking you to the heart of every song. It’s a pure and simple pleasure.