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.
Wao is living proof that Joseph Shabason & Nicholas Krgovich and Tenniscoats, two utterly distinctive musical acts, can collaborate successfully and create something new without losing any of their own potency in the process. This outwardly unassuming album is as wise and beautiful and unexpected as anything currently happening in the furthest-flung outposts of music.
Pareidolia is a subtle and teasing record, beautiful and sometimes bewildering. It has an engrossing element that resembles the arc of a story, which is difficult to achieve in improvisational music but which gives you an insight into how closely and how well Eiko Ishibashi and Jim O’Rourke work together, and how much background work they put into this intuitive, cohesive album.
With Patterns, Katy Pinke & Will Graefe nail the perfect cover album, hitting an impeccable balance between variety of material and consistency of tone. While covering well-known songs by Bobbie Gentry, The Beach Boys, Elliott Smith, SZA, Frank Ocean, Paul Simon and Jeff Buckley, you could come to Patterns without knowing any of these songs, and it would still be an entrancing and rewarding listen.
Marissa Nadler is perhaps the most distinctive and gifted songwriter working in the nebulous realm of dark folk, and New Radiations feels like a perfect distillation of her unsettlingly graceful music: essential for long-time fans and ideal for newcomers. It could easily become a career-defining album.
An open secret, Cass McCombs is a talent lauded by critics and peers but remains something of an outsider. On Interior Live Oak, he’s in predictably fine form, delivering one of his strongest collections of songs that showcase an easily worn, hard-won maturity, with a perfect balance between concision and variation. This satisfying and beguiling album leaves you hoping it will finally earn him the broader recognition he so deserves.
Fletcher Tucker’s ‘Kin’ is a more earthy, rather than a cosmic music; it genuinely sounds like nothing else, an album full of ritualistic sonic patterns and precisely detailed shifts in tone and mood, an album rooted less in a single landscape than in the very idea of landscape, and all the ancientness and weirdness that implies.
Cory Hanson delivers a rare combination: clever arrangements and emotional heft. ‘I Love People’ feels like a continuation of 2023’s Western Cum, conjuring up dusty roads and shimmering horizons with rolling country-rock and mature piano ballads. Nailing this many styles is tough, but Hanson’s surefooted songwriting weaves the disparate elements into a vivid, unapologetically American tapestry with an almost magical precision.
The latest edition of the Ceremonial Counties tape series from Folklore Tapes features Bristol and Hertfordshire. Musician and visual artist Jake Blanchard tackles Bristol, the first part likened to Faust and Steve Reich in a competitive morris dance. Side two features Geology Disco and is devoted to Hertfordshire. While little is known of Geology Disco, the future of New Weird Britain is in safe hands.
We chat to Ruth Clinton and Cormac MacDiarmada of Poor Creature about their debut album, All Smiles Tonight. A deep dive into its making, their influences (from the Cocteau Twins to Ellen Arkbro) and more. The album feels like a new high point in the constantly evolving experimental folk scene centred around Dublin and a thoroughly modern foray into ancient musical territory. But is it folk?
On Columbia Deluxe, Fuubutsushi sound simultaneously like a bunch of musicians who have never met and a group who have been playing together for an eternity. These tracks, in a live setting, have developed a life beyond the logistical constraints of their conception. Beautiful and increasingly complex, they have become a celebration of live performance and a reminder of how music still plays a vital role in human interaction.
This month’s edition of the Ceremonial Counties tape series from Folklore Tapes features Essex and Rutland, two counties that share strong links to Britain’s Roman history. Laurel Morgan’s contribution, The Last Stand at Ambresbury, draws lines between the mythic Boudicca and modern ideas about landscape, ecology, feminism and rebellion, while guitarist and improviser Richard Chamberlain creates seven distinct pieces, each inspired by a different phase of Rutland’s history.
This Material Moment is Me Lost Me’s most personal album yet. On this new release, Newcastle-based Jayne Dent’s songwriting has become both more immediate and more accomplished, with each song existing in its own undeniable present. It’s an alarmingly good album, stormy and intense at one moment, wise and contemplative the next.