The Burning Hell were so impressed by Nev Clay, one of Newcastle’s best-kept secrets, that Mathias Kom asked to review Nev’s new album, ‘So Little Happened for So Long’ – “It’s my record of the year, and the remainder of 2024 is irrelevant”.
It’s unusual to encounter a debut full-length album with as much confidence and clarity as Malin Lewis’s Halocline, which is also a work of subtle, nuanced beauty. We met with the Scottish piper to learn more about it.
Halocline, the debut album from Malin Lewis, our Artist of the Month, is a highly creative and singular forty minutes of music that’s unique in its character and emotion. Clever in its approach and balanced in its execution, in short, it’s quite exceptional.
Martin Simpson is our latest ‘Off the Shelf’ guest, in which we ask artists to present objects from a shelf or shelves from their home and talk about them. Martin’s new album, Skydancers, is out now on Topic Records.
Martin Simpson’s Skydancers is a beautifully packaged album. The music exudes class and quality, but what impresses most is the restraint. No notes are wasted and all instrumental flourishes land, enhancing each song. It is an excellent record from a master of his craft.
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.
