Category: Folk
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Michael Bernard Fitzgerald: Love Valley
This is Fitzgerald’s fifth album but we’ve not heard of him before; he’s a Canadian singer-songwriter so he’s been honing his craft over there. It’s a nice little album, in the best senses of “nice” and “little”: it’s a cosy musical companion that will bring comfort to fans of Americana and folky roots in these…
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Jack Henderson: Where’s The Revolution
If the injustices of the world leave you feeling helpless because there’s so much wrong and so little you can do, we can offer a small action you can take – buy Jack Henderson’s new album.Henderson sounds as if he’s a jobbing musician who does well – his biography says he’s played with the likes…
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Monkey See Monkey Do: The Night Out
They’ve self-released this, so if you like folk and are missing your favourite folk club, you should buy it on principle. Happily, it’s also good; they play folk that sounds modern and traditional at the same time, and tells a good tale. It opens with Pound A Week Rise; we Googled the lyrics and it…
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Tim Fredericks: Singer Songwriter 2
This is a follow-up to an album that came out last year; they gave away the last one and we guess the same is true of this. It came out before lockdown, so now they can’t even give it away. The songs are by Tim Fredericks and his band, who are from Crewe, Macclesfield, Stoke…
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Damien Jurado: What’s New, Tomboy?
This is the 15th studio album from singer songwriter Jurado, and it’s a more solid musical offering than we were expecting. It’s still a fairly stripped-back sound, but it just seems a little more forceful, although we guess Jurado fans buy his albums for the lyrics. All the songs are about relationships and many of…
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Ben Avison: Lovers’ Leap
Avison has a gentle voice and writes gentle tunes, which means there’s a danger his songs could be merely bland. We receive albums that are so unutterably dull that we can think of nothing to say about them (good or bad) but this is not one. Although on a couple of occasions he does veer…
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Non Canon: Non Canon II
I don’t known much for sure but can say with utter certainty that Non Canon (aka Barry Dolan) has the most rabid fans in the country; either that or a large family. I reviewed his first album under this name, the imaginatively entitled Non Canon (sans I), and said that while I could see that…
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Jeffrey Foucault: Blood Brothers
When we started this reviewing lark we’d sometimes have a record of the week, although we usually forgot: this week it would be this. Foucault’s from Wisconsin so this is Americana with some of the twang of country. He has an evocative voice and the songs are all good. We’ve not felt this much settled…
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Andrew Hawkey: Long Story Short
We liked Hawkey before we heard a note: he was born in 1942 (yes, really) in Wadebridge, Cornwall, a favourite Review Corner haunt (and home to Andrew Ridgeley) and also lived in Cheshire. He left school at 15 to work on poultry farms, but became an estate agent. He was in London for the swinging…
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Harp and a Monkey: The Victorians
This is a joy of an album, something a little different and with plenty of interest for the listener. The title seems to be from the fact that they’re from Manchester and sing of tales from the city’s industrial history; they’re a band that tells stories set to music. The cover sleeve is a peppered…
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