Honest, in-depth album reviews by KLOF Mag – championing and curating intelligent, uncompromising voices in contemporary and experimental music since 2004.
Albums
Jake Blount & Mali Obomsawin’s Symbiont is a magical fusion of natural beauty, fragility, turbulence and ever-evolving motion. It is awe-inspiring, a ball of chance and wonder, much like the planet Earth.
Jon Boden & The Remnant Kings’ Parlour Ballads shines a light on an unfairly neglected part of musical history–a collection of beautifully performed, sad and compassionate songs brought to life by one of folk music’s premier performers.
Featuring Julie Fowlis, Ewen Henderson, the late Simon Emmerson, and more, the musicianship across Highlands is consistently first-rate, and every song is a complete delight. It’s many sublime moments more than warrants listening to, in or out of the Lush Spa.
Through OPHELIA, Angeline Morrison conjures a perfect, otherworldly landscape of hauntological folk music…imagine if Broadcast’s Trish Keenan had been kidnapped at birth by the Copper family and raised on a diet of Angela Carter’s fairy tales…
Scottish singer Kate Young’s solo debut Umbelliferæ is an album full of ambition, but Young never lets that ambition blind her to the importance of her message or the sheer delight of her songcraft. Umbelliferæ is the work of years: a wise, joyous epic.
John Patrick Elliott is an expert when it comes to making seemingly disharmonious concepts and radically disparate musical ideas work together, and My Role in the Show is the most perfectly realised example of that talent in his distinguished career.
Lea Thomas’s “Cosmos Forever” follows an expansive and timeless pathway, allowing her to incorporate broader influences while maintaining the essence of what great music is all about.
The latest Betwixt and Between offering features London-based singing duo Bridget & Kitty and Sheffield free-folk improvisers Resonant Bodies. The cassette series is quickly becoming a valuable document of the outer reaches of British experimental folk music.
With ‘In The Dark We Grow’, Hannah Sanders & Ben Savage have delivered a brilliant and beguiling album; well-crafted and captivating, it’s one to treasure.
Displaying a real willingness to push boundaries, The Rheingans Sisters’ ‘Start Close In’ is an endlessly fascinating, multi-faceted album steeped in the traditions of European folk dance but equally inspired by the avant-garde leanings of John Cale and twentieth-century minimalism.
