Tag: Visions Of Hope

Birmingham’s funky alt-folk band BONFIRE RADICALS have a new EP called Flywheel for no readily explicable reason. If you haven’t heard them before you really should. They play mostly western instruments but sound exotic and Katie Stevens’ clarinet and kaval are the key alongside Michelle Holloway’s recorder and flute while Sarah Farmer takes a more conventional “folk” role They open with the stomping ‘Zalizome/Den Boro Manoula M’, both traditional Greek tunes and follow that with an original composition, ‘The Lost Pick’, which takes a very different melodic approach.

‘Love Is Teasing’ is not necessarily a song you’d expect to find in their repertoire – a traditional song that is either Scottish, Irish or Appalachian depending on where you choose to start from. Bonfire Radicals turn up the exoticism with startling harmony vocals and instrumental breaks that take off to who knows where. ‘Sarah’s Muffins’ showcases the engine room of Pete Churchill and Ilias Lintzos but only for a while – there are four women and two chaps in the band so guess who has the biggest say. Finally, ‘Squeeze That Satsuma’ is a short leave-them-wanting-more tune to send the listener back to the beginning again.
https://bonfireradicals.com

Rhyming slang, joined by Katriona Gilmore on fiddle and mandolin and bassist Jonny Wickham, Ginger Beer is a self-released EP by LIZZY HARDINGHAM that tells six stories with queer themes through both original and traditional song. That said, built around a circling guitar figure, ‘Small Vessels’ is a call for inclusion that’s actually more geared towards refugees (“While I am living, I’ll share this home/With those still searching for one of their own/There are so many who take to small vessels/And come to our shoreline seeking to settle”) as she sings “Some 15000 have crossed just this year/And the media frenzy peddle hatred and fear/When all they are looking for is an outstretched hand/But the Home Secretary says they can’t make a home of this land”.

Recounting a true (but here somewhat fanciful) story, ‘Mary and Anne’ tells of  Mary Read and Anne Bonny, female pirates who may have been lovers (the message is “You love just who you love/Be it lad or lass, be it friend or foe”) though its description of how “Mary was in the navy when her vessel was attacked/And Anne had stowed aboard a ship with Calico Jack/One did raid the other and Mary said to Anne /If you strip my sailor’s uniform you won’t find me a man” is somewhat fanciful. Their exploits were actually short-lived, both arrested in 1720, spared hanging as they were pregnant, though Read died in prison in 1721.

Fingerpicked and dreamy, ‘Mother Says’ recalls how she learnt folk music and guitar as a child, and how music can help you “make sense of the hurt” and that “A song and a story might help you see yourself/And rearrange the life that you had planned/Loving is like music – it doesn’t care who plays/And my mother taught us it’ll be okay”. ‘Ballad of Tom Robinson’ really needs no further explanation than its title, celebrating how he

“told us to sing and be proud” and, 40 years on, her encouragement to “sing at the top of your lungs/Sing for the ones who still need to hear it/Sing not just for today but to show us the way/The time isn’t near it’s now so sing”.

The traditional element comes with the gently swaying ‘Reedcutter’s Daughter’, a song about a traveller falling for a girl in Hoverton and being torn between settling down or following the road, Hardingham giving the lyrics a queer makeover to sing “the times they are hard when a girl loves another/When really she shouldn’t and the law says it’s so”. Given a traditional feel, it ends back on the water with ‘Let Me Swim’, a song about being true to what calls you (“The waves beckon me in/The water washes everything I’m not/And bathes me in my skin/I was born for the sea”), whatever that may be in life and love. A terrific collection and a reminder that she’s one of the finest voices on today’s folk scene.
www.lizzyhardingham.com

SAM BAXTER AND MERLE HARBRON release their debut EP in a few days’ time. Sam is English and Merle hails from the West Highlands and their expertise lies in traditional music although with a twist. The opener, ‘Scan Tester’s’ features plucked violin and a vocalised melody initially by Sam and then both voices in harmony. Is it a version of lilting? You can decide.

‘An t’Altan (The Stream)’ is a more conventionally performed piece. That said, the twin violins do sound a little strident at times and there are unsettling swoops and dives by the second instrument. ‘Bobbing Joan’ is an English country dance tune although Sam and Merle don’t hold to a strict tempo and, again, the two fiddles seem to be working antagonistically. ‘Chaunting Bonny’ is another English country dance tune, this time from Cumbria, and although it seems very simple when written down Sam and Merle do complicated things with it.

Finally, ‘Meeting In A Pleasant Place’ is a song with more antecedents and variants than can be listed here. It is sung by Merle over Sam shruti box, played about as low as one can get with Merle adding a violin break. If you’re not fully into fiddle music this may not be for you but Sam and Merle are certainly pushing the envelope of what can be done.
https://sambaxterandmerleharbron.bandcamp.com/album/sam-baxter-and-merle-harbron

An antidote to the bullying rhetoric of Trump’s Make America Great Again, MARTYN JOSEPH releases ‘Last Night I Heard America’ (Pipe), a simple fingerpicked and harmonica coloured co-write with Stewart Henderson he describes as  a journey through to the greater good contained in its past, leafing through its ‘three chord atlas’ and travelling a highway “strewn with rusted Chevrolets” that visits Glen Campbell’s Galveston, Phoenix and Wichita, rides Paul Simon’s Pittsburgh Greyhound, asks the way to San Jose, wanders Tom Waits’ Jersey shore and walks Gram’s streets of Baltimore. Mourning for the America he remembers, its soul lost in transit, it ends “Come back home America/Before everything gives way”. Magnificent.
www.martynjoseph.net

From their album, East Of Elsewhere, THE ROLLING FOLK featuring Virginia Kettle, release a new single ‘Trouble’ – “I stay away from trouble/but trouble won’t stay away from me”. Virginia is in particularly fine voice here and the song is typical of her writing. Coincidentally, it’s also a good song for the coming of winter.
https://www.facebook.com/p/Virginia-Kettles-Rolling-Folk-100063562898032/

A self-released solo release from LIZ SIMMONS, lead singer with Vermont string trio Low Lily, featuring cellist Natalie Haas and Scottish fiddler Louise Bichan, ‘Wander Free’ is a departure from their old-timey sound with more mellow Celtic folk colours and lovely soaring vocals as it comes to a fade. Her attempt to capture in poetry the elemental nature of what it means to be alive, it really should be part of the Rings Of Power soundtrack.
www.lizsimmons.net

Rather more restrained than their previous single, OTHERISH release a double A-side ‘Pyramids Of T​í​r Chonaill/My Lagan Love’. The first is an original track marking the passing of summer – not a lament although it begins “August is gone” but more a celebration of a season enjoyed. At least they don’t mention the C-word. They call ‘My Lagan Love’ a gem of the Irish canon and so it is although the words by Joseph Campbell are not always conventionally romantic. Two lovely tracks.
https://otherish1.bandcamp.com/

‘Blow The Wind Southerly’ is the first release from LEWIS BARFOOT’s forthcoming self-released EP The Old Bog Road, a collection of a capella traditional folk songs from Ireland and the UK that explores the themes of love, longing and lament. Beautifully sung with a slow melancholy and yearning and capturing all the emotional resonance, the song originates from Sunderland and, first published in the Bishoprick Garland in 1834, speaks of a woman looking out to sea, longing for the wind to blow her lover back home.
www.lewisbarfoot.com

EUAN BLACKMAN should have a radio hit at the very least with his new single, ‘Sneak Attack’, a powerful slab of folk-rock about a man with a dilemma. He’s lost his girl and still wants her but should he tell the girl he’s just met about her? We should all have such problems.
https://www.facebook.com/euanblackmanmusic/

Taken from his forthcoming album, Hope In My Chest, Fire In My Throat (Frontline), JOE WILKES recounts the life events of his self-willed granddad, Fred, on the self-descriptively titled fingerpicked ‘Traditional Style’ (Frontline). Born in 1889, he went deaf in later years on account of his work as a blacksmith’s striker, but still continued to sing to himself. Sung in Fred’s voice, the lyrics tell of his kids, Doreen, Gladis, Harry, Sid, Fred junior and Wilkes’s father Stan, but how he and both his wives ended up going their separate ways. It’s all true except for the fantasy in which he murders Wilkes’ maternal grandfather ill-tempered factory foreman Jack Lester, doing so, as the song wryly by how he “folded the blade in traditional style/And remarked upon the strange weather”. Very Peaky Blinders!
www.joewilkes.bandcamp.com/track/traditional-style-2

Irish singer/songwriter FIONN REGAN plays a rich, insistent acoustic guitar topped with echoey vocals on his new single, ‘Farewell’. The track is taken from his forthcoming album, O Avalanche, and is a story of staying up all night to say goodbye to someone although it is actually fare thee well, not goodbye.
https://www.fionnregan.com/

Welsh multi-instrumentalist siblings trio THE MEADOWS, Melody, Fantasia and Titania, break a three year recording silence with the gorgeous, typically ethereal Celtic folk ‘Where Will It Lead?’ (Pokey Cupboard Records). Written by Fantasia, who plays piano, Titania on soaring lead vocals (with Bush shades), with Melody on flute and featuring brother Harvey on violin and Ryan Aston on drums, it pulls together the sisters’ layered airy morning mist harmonies to explore themes of restlessness, self-discovery and faith. A new album should be blossoming next year.
www.themeadowsband.co.uk

‘Tha Sneachd Air Druim Uachdair’ is the haunting second single by JULIE FOWLIS AND EWEN HENDERSON taken from the new album, Highlands. The title translates as ‘There Is Snow On Drumocter’ which sounds almost as good in English as it does in Gaelic. It opens with the wild sound of seagulls leading to fiddle and drones before Julie begins the 200 year old lyrics and bouzouki-guitar and bodhran complete the sonic landscape.
https://www.facebook.com/juliefowlis

The new single from LITTLE LORE, the Americana-hued ‘This Building Is Condemned’ (self-released) was inspired at a cross-section between a one-act play (This Property Is Condemned) by Tennessee Williams and the idea of a condemned building as a metaphor for how it feels to be a post-menopausal woman.  Fingerpicked with violin and cello accompaniment and reminiscent of Baez, it comes with a certain four letter expletive in describing what two lovers got up to in the house, but it wouldn’t work as well without it.
www.littlelore.uk

In advance of his new album, BRENDAN MELIA releases an Irish classic, ‘Step It Out Mary’, as a single. It’s a fine, rollicking version built on banjo and harmonica, with a chorus that was belted out in many a folk club back in the day never heeding the fact that the song ends in tragedy.
https://www.facebook.com/brendan.melia.37

Produced by and featuring Kris Drever, the strummed folksy Celtic meets Appalachia hymnal ‘Mandolin Man’ is the latest from Scotland’s FREDA LEASK, inspired by a farewell letter written by a 23-year-old – in his final days as, confined to a hospital bed with tuberculosis in his spine, he found comfort and purpose in playing his mandolin, urging his loved ones not to grieve but to celebrate the life he had lived.  The best song about a mandolin since Rod Stewart.
www.fredaleask.com

MICHAEL MESSER & CHAZ JANKEL release a new single with an important message. ‘Visions Of Hope’ opens with a simple riff on a thumb piano and gradually builds up to a full-blooded arrangement with strings, backing chorus and some tasty guitar.
www.michaelmesser.co.uk

Featuring trilling mandolin, ‘Never Looked So Good To Me Before’ is a new self-released single from KATE McLEOD’S MIND THE GAP, a song about the rejuvenation that finding new love brings and with tasting notes of Appalachia and Iris DeMent.
www.katemacleod.com

Irish country singer MARY GANTLEY releases a piano-based single, ‘Just Me And You’. The country influences are present in the melody but the usual tropes are played down and it’s a lovely song that could be a hit if it reaches the right ears.
https://www.facebook.com/mary.gantley/

Leading up to his new album, I’m Just Like You, a collection of songs by Chris Smither, one of his formative influences, Black Country acoustic folk blues singer SUNJAY releases a double-side single via Mighty Tight Records (MTRS202401), that, sung with an easy assured confidence,  pairs the uptempo fingerpicked blues ‘Link Of Chain’ with the choppier , more percussive ‘Don’t Call Me Stranger’, he being joined by drummer and bassist Josh Clark, Jonny Henderson on keys, harmonica player Lee Southall and Katriona Gilmore on backing vocals and fiddle.
www.sunjay.tv