We met Jenny Sturgeon and Boo Hewerdine to talk about their new Outliers album, a beautiful celebration of spontaneity and space, blending strong songwriting with acoustic arrangements and subtle electronics.
Jenny Sturgeon and Boo Hewerdine’s Outliers revels in the beauty of the remote. While conceived and recorded entirely online, it feels astonishingly close. The attention to detail and clarity of sound are incredible, and their contributions are clearly defined yet entirely in accord.
We meet up with English folk masters Eliza Carthy and Jon Boden, our current Artists of the Month, to talk about their wonderful new album Glad Christmas Comes and rum topped diplomacy…
At sixteen songs, Eliza Carthy & Jon Boden’s “Glad Christmas Comes” is, appropriately, like a big Christmas lunch that you won’t want to finish. Beautiful music from two of our very finest and most valuable artists, it is a very easy album to love.
Harry’s Seagull shows how old songs sung with affection and skill can sparkle like new. Georgia Shackleton’s solo debut is light as a gull’s feather but flush with ideas: it’s one of the freshest and most appealing folk albums of the year.
We talk to The Furrow Collective (Rachel Newton, Alasdair Roberts, Lucy Farrell and Emily Portman) about their new album, We Know by the Moon – a chilly delight: eleven folk songs blasted by winter winds and steeped in the glow of firelight and moonlight.
On ‘Look Over the Wall, See the Sky’, John Francis Flynn unropes songs from their historical moorings and lets them barrel downstream…Refreshing and vividly utopian, these songs exist in liberated states that have the feel of radical statements.
The Furrow Collective are simply one of the most formidable combinations of musicians in today’s folk music scene, and in “We Know by the Moon”, they have created one of the year’s outstanding albums.
Honey & the Bear’s “Away Beyond the Fret” is a remarkable album, especially for capturing profound personal moments alongside folklore, history, nature, superstition, and awe-inspiring tales. They live it like they sing it, with open minds, ears and hearts.
We chat to Sheffield’s Melrose Quartet about their new album ‘Make the World Anew’ – a staunch defence of the sheer joy of creativity, allowing for contemporary political songwriting and age-old dance tunes, poignant a cappella standards and complex instrumentals.
Chris Brain’s ‘Steady Away’ is an introspective and reflective offering. Intelligently written and considerately handled, it’s everything a second album should be; an excellent album by a musician really starting to bloom.
Catrin Finch & Aoife Ní Bhriain’s ‘Double You’ goes beyond virtuosic; it’s also layered with emotion, appreciation for style and tradition and the freedom of just playing. You are left feeling that this partnership was inevitable and absolutely necessary…an essential release.
