Thomas Blake
Thomas Blake
Thomas Blake lives in the West Country with his wife and his son. He writes things down and looks things up for a living. He likes wine, cricket and modernism. And lots of black coffee.
The Folklore Tapes Ceremonial Counties series continues with Vol.XXII: Tyne and Wear | Somerset. Maryanne Royle’s “The Stone Throat” takes listeners into Newcastle’s Victoria Tunnel, blending social history, hauntology and post-industrial soundscape into one of the series’ most atmospheric pieces. Paddy Steer’s “Swerving Coach” is its perfect foil — a fidgety, fascinating folly from Somerset’s most haunted corners.
Wendy Eisenberg’s self-titled new album is a distinct departure — gorgeously orchestrated baroque folk-rock of remarkable maturity and complexity. With lush string arrangements from co-producer mari rubio (more eaze) adding warmth and depth throughout, these ten exquisite songs trace a fine line between agonised self-examination and celebration. It’s the kind of album that scratches an itch you didn’t know you had.
Joshua Abrams’ Music For Pulse Meridian Foliation is a single, thirty-five-minute swathe of all-enveloping, slow-moving minimalism. Originally a score for Lisa Alvarado’s multidisciplinary installation at REDCAT, CalArts, the album tracks a semi-fluid path, advancing like cooling lava — a matrix of abundant and not always predictable intersections, there to be explored, to inspire fierce thought, but also to luxuriate in or meditate on.
On “sentence structure in the country,” more eaze leans into her love of song and embraces her upbringing as a folk-oriented fiddle player. Collaboration is key, with Wendy Eisenberg and others helping shape an album where trademark contrasts feel more subtle and fluid than ever. A bewildering array of influences leveraged into a sustained, emotionally resonant and surprisingly compact work of art.
Many of the songs on Joshua Burnside’s “It’s Not Going to Be Okay” can disarm you or take your breath away from their very first lines. Burnside is the most consistently human and the most surprising of songwriters. Details spring out at you like spiders from the cracks between floorboards. Meteors and energy-efficient light bulbs, blackbirds and bears, spaceships and Peugeots. The profound and the quotidian occupy the same arena.
It is more in-your-face than much of their recent work, thematically if not musically. More engaged and more engaging. The sound of a band alive to the changing world with all its problems and all its wonder. News from Planet Zombie is another important dispatch from the Notwist’s entirely unique corner of the musical world, an album full of closely-observed detail that warrants rapt attention.
The latest in the Folklore Tapes Ceremonial Counties series pairs AHRKH — the solo venture of Gnod’s A P Macarte — with Scottish/Turkish singer and sound artist Bell Lungs. Macarte delivers a satisfying slab of arhythmic, amelodic drone inspired by the Isle of Wight’s Mottistone longstone, while Bell Lungs weaves an extraordinary fifteen-minute folk opera from the cursed legend of Raggedstone Hill.
Gregory Uhlmann’s ‘Extra Stars’ is a fluent and fluid album of thirteen brief, breezy, deceptively light tracks that flow over diverse territories while retaining their identity. An album obsessed with natural processes — some organic and cellular, others more cosmic — it showcases Uhlmann as guitarist, arranger, composer and improviser, his musical curiosity working in tandem with his expansive imagination.
Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s “We Are Together Again” sees Will Oldham slip into folky singer-songwriter mode — sometimes confessional, sometimes gnomic, always intriguing. A conservative estimate suggests this is his thirty-first studio album, and while he still circles themes that have preoccupied him since his Palace Brothers days, he has become wider reaching and more approachable. This is some of his best work.
Iron & Wine’s Hen’s Teeth is decidedly darker than its sibling album, admitting emotional ambiguity at every turn. Sam Beam knows that a lot can happen in the span of a single song, and here he leans ever further into the South’s musical traditions, surrounding himself with collaborators who double the vulnerability at the heart of his most open-hearted work in years.
Tōth has always been somewhat genre-slippery; it’s proof of his unwillingness to stay in one place for too long, and that’s something to be celebrated. There aren’t too many musicians making heart-on-sleeve emotional rollercoasters with this much control, poise and skill. ‘And The Voice Said’ moves in all directions at once, and ends up exactly where it should be.
Philadelphia/Chicago duo The Early have mastered a specific brand of improvised music that draws on jazz and hard-edged experimental rock. Across their latest EP, Cusp, and album, I Want to be Ready, Lewis and Nussbaum pass through landscapes, lighting them up and leaving them changed for the better. A resounding success.