Album review: Alasdair Roberts og Völvur – ‘The Old Fabled River’: Scots-Norwegian sextet debut a record of correspondences, life cycles and exploratory depth
HE’S GRACED us with a very Northern European and delicious take on introspective folk since that trio of lovely albums, The Rye Bears A Poison, Daylight Saving and The Night Is Advancing as Appendix Out, beginning back in ’97; and it should come as no surprise that a man whose music arguably sounds best with …
See: Rachika Nayar explores the brittle, fleeting beauty of looped guitars on ‘clarity’ ahead of her EP for RVNG Intl
HERE at Backseat Mafia, we’ve loved the brittle, pretty guitar experimenta of New York’s Rachika Nayar for a good while; check our write-ups for a brace of single drops from her album for NNA Tapes at the beginning of the year, the otherworldly fire of “Losing Too Is Still Ours” and the potency of “The …
See: James Alexander Bright cools the July heat as he invites you to ‘Drink This Water’
!K7’S lo-fi rural psychedelic soul scion James Alexander Bright has emerged into the height of summer to slake our thirst with the Shuggie Otis-style leftfield chill of “Drink This Water”: nothing could be better than a deep draught of this tune, in which guitars laze, drum machines click and pop with the correct caress, James …
Premiere: Living legend Earl Slick pushes the instrumental blues into cinemascope with ‘Vanishing Point’, announces UK tour
JEEZ, will you look at that CV. Robert Smith, Bowie, David Coverdale, Glen Matlock, John and Yoko, The Yardbirds; quite clearly, Earl Slick is a man you need aboard if you need six strings tickled with real love and precision. He’s just dropped an album of instrumental blues, Fist Full Of Devils: but look, when …
Album review: Craig Fortnam – ‘Ark’: North Sea Radio man gathers his world in a prog-pastoral-folk craft of intricacy and thoughtfulness
ARCH GARRISON, whose lovely odyssey of modern Wessex psych-pastoralism The Bitter Lay we loved for all its exploration of thorny byways last year; a half-dozen or so long-playing outings in the North Sea Radio Orchestra; even back before the century’s turn, a solitary album with Shrubbies. In all these incarnations we’ve enjoyed and explored the …
EP review: Ian William Craig/Kago – ‘FatCat Split Series 24’: one final valedictory 12″ calls time on a superb experimental series
I DON’T know about you, with the vinyl revival – I mean, really, it’s a re-arrival now, isn’t it, here again for the foreseeable – that maybe the 12″ is one thing that hasn’t really had the credit it’s due in the resurgence. So it’s with a sad heart that we bring the news that …
Album review: Cameron Knowler – ‘Places Of Consequence’: a new music as old as the hills, immersive and atmospheric
TEXAN solo guitar practitioner and melodicist Cameron Knowler – whose lovely, exploratory album with Eli Winter, Anticipation, we fully embraced in early March – is unveiling his very first solo album with American Dreams this coming week. A lifelong Westerner and recent Los Angeles transplant, Knowler spent his childhood in Yuma, Arizona and Houston, Texas, …
Track: Cornish singer Billie Flynn debuts with the wistful, breathy folk-pop of ‘Hey Stranger’
LIVING among the gnarly granite and crashing waves of Cornwall’s rugged north coast is no bad thing for creative inspiration and evocation; as debuting Cornish singer Billie Flynn knows, as she unveils the hushed folk mystery of “Hey Stranger” Billie has just signed with Gabrielle Aplin’s Never Fade imprint and this first drop is, I …
See: Creation legends The Boo Radleys return with ‘A Full Syringe And Memories Of You’
I KNOW, I know. “Wake Up Boo!” the ubiqituous feelgood summer hit that propelled them right to the top of the pile, blasting from a million radios up and down the land. But let’s step back and deeper into the canon: the dub majesty of “Lazarus” (watch out for cameos from McGee and Liz Hurley …
See: Far Caspian drops the hushed guitar thrill of ‘Questions’, announces his debut album and a European tour
THESE days based in Leeds, the grand capital of God’s Own Country, Yorkshire, but hailing from the rural south-western corner of Northern Ireland, Joel Johnston returned home to put together his October debut album, Ways To Get Out, to revisit past selves, the musical diet he grew up on, remember the ways he himself got …