Featured Albums of the Month

Living in Italy, but born in San Fransisco, the globe-trotting Lucia Comnes has returned to her Americana roots for the passionate and sophisticated new album Love, Hope & Tyranny. Lucia is also getting set to make her UK debut in June with a CD Release Concert at London’s Green Note, one you don’t want to miss.

Eliza Carthy and Tim Eriksen finally found the means to combine their extraordinary talents and a couple of UK tours created the opportunity to open the Bottle in celebration. This is a great record, as accomplished and surprising as you might expect from two of the folk world’s most complete musical artists.

The Escape as an album already comes highly recommended and as the centre piece of a live gig it proved to be irresistible. UFQ have done it again, ensuring their live shows continue to provide top notch entertainment that really has to be experienced.

With new album Emerald, Dar Williams really does live up to her tag as one of America’s best singer songwriters and with tour dates imminent there’s cause for double celebration. Emerald also includes several notable guest appearances to further enhance its credentials. It channels the heartfelt, the honest, the vital and and the poetic into one electrifying whole.

We caught up with Fabian Holland for a quick chat about his exceptional second album ‘A Day Like Tomorrow’ and the way his narrow boat life is starting to influence his work. Whilst life is not all plain sailing there are plenty of upbeat moments as he admits “…there are times when you just forget that you’re living in London, which is probably why I like it so much.”

For their sixth album, A Forest of Arms, the Great Lake Swimmers find their principal songwriter and lead voice, Tony Dekker, at his most potent. The album bristles with some of their strongest tunes and the most dynamic playing that the band have realised so far.

With a talent partly forged in Florida and fuelled by French cinema’s New Wave Robert Chaney’s Cracked Picture Frames marks the arrival of a notable new voice on the London music scene. The album is sharp, intelligent, thoughtful and moving, as Robert sings, “I got some simple words to say,” but he says them so well, you can’t fail to be mightily impressed.

In her notes on the album, Thea writes that listening back to the old songs was like being haunted by the ghosts of her past. Rather than exorcise them, she’s given them new life while continuing to graffiti the wall of the music industry with music that matters, music with a heart and a mind rather than a corporate game plan. Long may she be “the girl that went and …

22 Strings finds Seckou Keita at the top of his game in a never less than compelling collection which draws together many threads: musings on identity, place, history, of music viewed through the lenses of past and present. An absorbing document of his inner search for answers to some of the essential questions of existence, filtered through his deep respect for tradition while facing the future with an irrepressible positivity.

With a new line up including Dan Walsh, Paloma, Joe and Tom have pushed the UFQ to new heights and The Escape offers exactly that with myriad musical highlights and global grooves to get lost in for months. This is the band at their brilliant best so make sure you catch them live on their current tour.

The Spyglass & The Herringbone gathers up all of Jackie Oates promise to date, dusts it down and adds polish to present a sparkling jewel of a folk record. It’s a rare and most refined thing of gift of great beauty and as good a record as you could rightly hope for, that’s all yours for the small price of admission.

Block booking Dublin’s prestigious Vicar Street for a month of concerts was a bold move, but one that has paid off handsomely for Paul Brady, with a little help from his friends. You can hear it for yourself on The Vicar St. Sessions Vol. 1 which is released this month via Proper Records. Read our review here.