With ‘Dandelion Breeze’, The Clements Brothers have delivered a terrific album that unassumingly and softly seeps into your soul and stakes its claim as one of the year’s best debuts.
August 2023
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Our Song of the Day comes from Niamh Bury. Watch her performing her debut single, Beehive, live in Phoenix Park, Dublin. It’s not just her balletic vocals that stay with you after hearing this song, but also her tender and deeply poetic lyrics.
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Our latest Track by Track comes from Manx blues guitarist and singer Davy Knowles with his new album ‘If I should Wander’. While musically, it is a departure from the music he’s best known for; it’s also his most striking album to date.
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A new mini-album showcases The Scrub Jay Orchestra – the name adopted by the well-matched Hot Vultures (Ian A. Anderson & Maggie Holland) and “wunderkind” guitarist Martin Simpson when touring in 1979.
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Gregory Alan Isakov’s ‘Appaloosa Bones’ is an album suffused with enigmatic poetic imagery that complements the simple but exquisite contemplative arrangements…an album to absorb as you lay outside on a summer night gazing up at the stars.
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Listen to the Monday Morning Brew featuring Hackberry Ramblers, Alice Stuart, Frank Fairfield, Chance McCoy, Jesse Fuller, The Doc Watson Family, Barbara Dane, Precious Bryant, Ola Belle Reed, Dock Boggs, Othar Turner, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Clarence “Tom” Ashley, Roscoe Holcomb, The Georgia Potlickers and more.
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As whimsy and reality converge, Stephen Steinbrink’s ‘Disappearing Coin’ is delightful and endearing, an album filled with playfulness and wonder… this coin should not disappear without a trace.
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‘Arhoolie Records Down Home Music’ is a visual storytelling celebration of American roots music through unseen and newly scanned photographs by Chris Strachwitz, the founder of the legendary Arhoolie Records. The book also features a substantial 20,000-word essay by award-winning music journalist Joel Selvin.
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From a ‘BBC In Concert’ recording, made on 4th January 1971 and featuring Jacqui McShee, Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Danny Thompson and Terry Cox, watch Pentangle performing ‘I’ve Got a Feeling’, from their ‘Sweet Child’ album.
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Australian folk quartet The Heart Collectors share their video for ‘Sirius B’, a transcendent Folk-Pop ballad combining the hopeful discovery of love with nuanced and wistful mysteries.
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Taken from their new album, The Beautiful Road, watch the latest video from Rónán Ó Snodaigh & Myles O’Reilly. ‘Calling All Angels’ was filmed and edited by Myles O’Reilly and features Rónán and Wexford hurler Diarmuid Lyng.
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We revisit Gerry Diver’s Speech Project – music derived from the melody and rhythm of spoken words – ‘a kind of folk minimalism on the cutting edge of folk crossover’. The album featured contributions from Shane MacGowan, Christy Moore, Damien Dempsey, Danny Meehan and Martin Hayes.
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Finch and Blasucci seem to have a way of leaning into the sweet spots of each other’s work…while living in different cities, Mapache have found the musical moments that bind the two as a band. Swinging Stars continues to deliver sheer west coast magic.
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Ballads of Seduction, Fertility And Ritual Slaughter is a wonderfully consistent, decidedly spooky re-imagining of The Wicker Man soundtrack. It is full of odd delights and is, almost certainly, best listened to sitting down. Shocks are, after all, so much better absorbed with knees bent.