August 2021

River Lea announces Fire Draw Near – an album of Irish traditional songs and music from the archives, compiled by Ian Lynch of Dublin band Lankum which will be released on October 8th, 2021.

Featuring Clare Sands & Bridin, The Bonny Men, Owen Shiers, Nick Hart, Sam Kelly & The Lost Boys, False Lights, The Willows, Trú, Antoni Breskey, Lisa Knapp, James Yorkston, The Memory Band, Kathryn Tickell, Marry Waterson & David A. Jaycock, Oysterband, The Rheingans Sisters & more.

Throughout ‘Home No More’, the Folkatron Sessions make clever use of subtle experimentation to enhance and celebrate traditional song. This is experimental folk at its best. Excellent.

With sympathetic arrangements moving alongside each other fluidly throughout and Steve Gunn’s voice to the fore, ‘Other You’ is his most elegant sounding solo record yet.

We rejoin Ye Vagabonds who are currently on their ‘All Boats Rise’ tour. They update us on their journey after Belmont as they make their way to Ballycommon via Pollagh and Rahan playing gigs with Feli Speaks and John Francis Flynn along the way.

The Frank Burkitt Band return next month with Silvereye. Taken from the album, watch their latest video for ‘World King’, a scathing biography of Boris Johnson that carries a hint of optimism and hope for change.

Featuring songs from landworkers and some well-known folk singers, ‘Stand Up Now’ is a beautiful and enchanting album that uses its traditional sound to explore a range of political issues surrounding the agricultural industry. Ultimately, it’s an album about hope; hope for a better, fairer world.

Martin Callingham premieres a beautifully animated video for his new single Scully, taken from his highly anticipated sophomore album ‘Patterns’ due for release this November. Callingham clearly hasn’t lost any of his touch for painting in the pastoral light.

The changing moods of Sam Kelly and the Lost Boys‘ “The Wishing Tree” form a big part of its charm. From the thought-provoking lyrics to the musicianship, you’d be hard pushed to find the merest chink in their armour and here they demonstrate that to perfection.

Stick In The Wheel announce a new mixtape release, Tonebeds for Poetry, with first track The Cuckoo. The album explores lost civilisations, inertia, beats music, sludge, drone, glitch and the sounds of the city, held together with ancient word-glue, repurposed to deliver vital, urgent messages for now.

Arriving ten years after The Faux Paws first got together, this debut may have been long in the gestation, but the experience and musical wisdom accumulated in that time has clearly paid off for a quietly unassuming but highly infectious album.

Our Song of the Day comes from the legendary Mike Edison, noted New York journalist, musician, author, and provocateur who teams up with Andalusian Troubadours Guadalupe Plata for an epic telling of the story of John Henry.

As a project, this Sonafric safari is a triumph in unearthing and presenting the music and musicians of Yaoundé’s underground music scene of some 50 years ago.  The legacy offered here on Cameroon Garage Funk illustrates the timelessness of the music and is highly recommended.

Martha Tilston has written, directed and stars in a film called ‘The Tape’ in which she plays a disillusioned songwriter drifting through life…until she finds inspiration at an atmospheric Cornish cliff-top house and records an album. Watch the film trailer.