folk track
See: Emma Houton – ‘Bow & Balance’: a Scots murder ballad reframed as soaring ambient folk
EMMA HOUTON, the ambient-folk artist based in New York who draws on the traditional songs we’re all surrounded by and those of her Irish ancestry, has released the video for a second track to be taken from her forthcoming debut album, The Bath. It’s her plaintive, bold reworking of the traditional murder ballad “Bow And …
Track: Alexa Rose – ‘Clearwater Park’: those endless childhood summers evoked in rootsy folk magic
WITH a third album of heartfelt, bell-clear folk songcraft due out in the autumn on Fat Possum’s Big Legal Mess imprint, Black Mountain, North Carolina-based Alexa Rose has released a sweet and ethereal evocation of those endless days of childhood summer, the sun hot and high, the evenings endless, the sense of expectancy and joy …
Rachel Sermanni – ‘Travelled’: Scottish folk troubadour bares all and announces winter tour
WITH her new EP, Swallow Me, due out in the first days of June – an EP which lays bare with delicacy and courage her living through the arrival of her firstborn in a hugely uncertain world, with all the forethought and adaptations that brings – Rachel Sermanni has revealed the video for “Travelled”, the …
See: Rachel Sermanni – ‘Swallow Me’: graceful, spiritual and lighter than air, it’s the title track from her June EP
BRINGING new life into the world and fresh hope for a budding spring, Strathspey folkie Rachel Sermanni is all set to drop her first EP in what feels like too long, actually, too long; and she’s throwing up the windows on that forthcoming release with the bell-clear offering to the fates of “Swallow Me”, which …
Track: heka signs to Balloon Machine and drops the smokey noir of ‘(a) wall’
A MULTIDISCIPLINARY artist by trade and by vocation, comfortable in any number of mediums, Heka is the sonic alias of Francesca Brierley, who’s just signed to the excellent Manchester-based independent Balloon Machine, home already to the breathtaking folk stylings of Laura Fell. Her debut EP for the zine-turned-label is succinctly titled (a) and will be …
Track: Little Arrow – ‘Poetically Diseased’ (Live at Four Bars, Cardiff, 2014): potent live take heralds the tenth anniversary rerelease of ‘Music, Masks & Poems’
HAILING from far out west in deepest Pembrokeshire, Little Arrow began making waves on the Welsh scene a decade back with a fully musically and emotionally realised debut album, Music, Masks & Poems. Tragically, Little Arrow’s frontman William Hughes died of cancer in December 2018, cutting short the career of a band with real depth …
News: Chloe Foy announces her long-awaited debut album; let her hush you with ‘Shining Star’
CHLOE FOY, the Gloucestershire singer-songwriter with a knack for a soul-baring lyric all wrapped in a sweet melodic glide, has announced that her debut album, Where Shall We Begin, will be with us just before midsummer; and in celebration of which bottle smashing against the hull, she’s dropped a new single, the hushed depths of …
News: Marisa Anderson and William Tyler announce an album together for Thrill Jockey; hear the title track, ‘Lost Futures’
TAKE two of the best instrumental guitarists currently working in instrumental Americana, Marisa Anderson and William Tyler; put them together in a studo; press record. It’s a simple idea, but an idea as brilliant as the results. In some ways it’s a surprise the two haven’t married their winding, mesmerising aesthetics before. In fact they …
See: The lyric video for the tumbling odd-folk of Yves Jarvis’ ‘Body Of Work’
YVES JARVIS is the artist and autodidact Jean-Sébastien Audet who, in a pseudo-Bill Callahanesque move, came out from behind his Un Blonde facemask after 2016’s excellent Good Will Come To You (according to his personal colour palette, it was bathed in yellow, for optimism), reborn with a new name. Over here at Backseat Mafia we adored his …
Premiere: Ted Barnes feat. Kristin McClement – ‘Metal Man’: a dusky tale of yearning from Clayhill’s quiet genius
WE’VE been quietly adoring the erm, quietly very adorable work which Ted Barnes, the one-time Clayhill singer, who literally did run away and join the circus after that band broke up a decade and half ago now, has been dropping over past weeks in the run-up to the release of his first album in too …