Category Archives: Folk/Americana
Goldmund – All Will Prosper (Western Vinyl)
Goldmund
All Will Prosper
Western Vinyl
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
Link: Goldmund on MySpace
There is something about Civil War-era music that is haunting yet intriguing. When you sit down and listen to these songs, you gain an appreciation to the beauty and spirit of the music surrounded by the horrors of war.
Whenever I think about The Civil War, I feel a sense of folklore more than a disturbance of the bloody battlefields and war torn country. Even with the bloodiest battles the United States had ever experienced, the stories told are almost surreal in nature, and expressed like a ghost story. You feel the earth move and our Nation morph into a new and exciting time period from the sounds that echo out of this traditional music.
With these songs, you feel the essence of heroism and bravado through a tumultuous and turbulent period. The songs are so simple and delicate, you cannot hardly imagine these traditional pieces emanating from this time period.
Keith Kenniff treats these songs like gentle ambient giant. Recording under the name Helios, that ambient music project paved a path for how these songs are played. There is a shimmering delicacy with Kenniff’s guitar playing. Overtly simple, each note is handled with care and the Berkeley School of Music graduate plucks away like one note is the sole foundation for the direction of the next. The acoustic guitar is the percussion and the bass; the only sound that dominates this release.
You may feel the album like a soundtrack to a Ken Burns documentary, or you might feel justified in the American music as you feel intellectually stimulated by the care it took to replicate these songs in modern texture. You can almost feel Kenniff re-visit the painstaking process of using songwriting as solace that burns deep into the night.
It’s his Shoegaze leanings that allow him to treat the guitar with glowing clarity. His version of “Amazing Grace” is beautiful. The background instruments are sparingly used for atmosphere. You barely realize they are there.
“Dixie,” “The Yellow Rose Of Texas,” or “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” are songs that take on new meaning when Kenniff performs them. Respectfully so, All Will Prosper will give you a deeper respect for this 19th Century music. And to put it all into perspective, Kenniff adds a contemporary piece, “Ashoken Farewell” that puts no differentiation to the sounds of the past and the present.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:55 — 3.6MB)
Nihiti – Faced With Splendor (lo bit landscapes)
MP3: Nihiti, “Pinko Morning”
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (7.5MB)
Nihiti
Faced With Splendor
lo bit landscapes
Rating: 3 out of 5
Link: Nihiti’s Official Site
For Nihiti and Faced With Splendour, this was an experiment for a band acclimated to electronic landscapes. They ditched the gadgetry and recorded in an acoustic environment. For an acoustic album, the results are intriguing. For a Nihiti album, it’s hit or miss.
“The Kind Ropes” starts us out promising. A cello backs up the strumming guitar that instantly turns into some coffee shop hippy folk accolade. It’s in the structure of intimate British folk, without the British and without the countryside tales. It may be more of something you will find draping the backdrop of an Anthropologie store and an act of escape, unless you find the inflated prices and strange items at Anthropologie therapeutic.
But just when you like a song, it repetition is heard, just in another song context and for me, it’s not something my attention span can take.
For “The Devil,” it’s a song I really like. If you want stripped down and raw, you have it in all of its Nick Drake glory. But for “Golden Pavilion” you get a sense of deja vu. It’s like they find a good concept and replicate it. For an EP, that tells me the time they allotted for creative concept was limited. Nonetheless, the songs on here are an interesting twist to the band, and decent to the ears.
With the band coming back around to electronic form next year, Faced With Splendor will feel like a subtle diversion.
Annie Crane – Jump With A Child’s Heart (Constant Clip)
MP3: “Copenhagen Heart”
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 4:10 — 9.5MB)
Crane
Jump With A Child’s Heart
Constant Clip
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
Link:
You can feel the air in Annie Crane’s music. The pauses in her songs are distinct. You become aware of them as they provide punctuation to her vocal communication while it builds effect at the end of her stanzas. It helps build a foundation to her Irish and folk musings.
She extracts an instant wonderment on the title track. A slide guitar tries to show off to a simple acoustic rhythmic hook. And when Crane comes in belting lyrics with a howling Irish accent, you are not sure if you are roaming down dusty roads or the illustrious green hillside. Either way you get that Cowboy Junkies enchantment that is all the more positive for it.
“You & Me & The Evergreen” adds a trumpet to the mix. It’s an unnecessary twist to the elegant feel of the overall song. However, when the horn re-appears on “The Island Manhattan,” it is used in just the right context; notes float in a lonely cadence used more as a purpose than as an accentuation. It’s defiance in spite of what is going on in the song, and unity that it can co-exist.
“Copenhagen Heart” is absolutely lovely. The strings flutter around a simple folk tune that tells a story that will fascinate you to soak up every essence of her skills as a singer songwriter.
There are a lot of amazing things that are going on in this album, and some things that don’t need to be littering up the album. I am sure you will find a few songs that you want to pluck out and enjoy all the way into the coming damp spring air.
Brown Bird – Salt For Salt (Supply & Demand Music)
MP3: Brown Bird – End Of Days
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (7.5MB)
Brown Bird
Salt For Salt
Supply & Demand Music
Rating: 4 out of 5
Link: http://brownbird.net/
NPR at the Newport Folk 2011: http://www.npr.org/2011/08/08/137184250/newport-folk-2011-brown-bird-live-in-concert?ft=1&f=1039
Have you seen the size of David Lamb’s beard? I am not talking ZZ Top status here, but the fullness of Lamb’s facial bush is one to behold. That beard tells a story just like Salt For Salt tells a story.
The richness of this duo’s sound (add MorganEve Swain) is that of an oak-aged timelessness. A song like “Chairkickers” preserves traditional elements to this eery waltz while giving it intrigue. Call it Lamb’s voice, or the chamber folk elegance that is as creepy as the words that warp around the strings and guitars into this death march. It’s not a drastic movement like Slim Cessna’s Auto Club or 16 Horsepower. What you feel is the hallowed ground were the music stems from.
If you like the Eels you will find Brown Bird a compliment. It’s what Deep Cricket Night can do but with two people. And both are equally spunky in acoustic versatility.
“End of Days” is a darkened night etched in candle-lit storytelling as Swain gracefully leads this number. The strings will make your skin tingle. Other songs like “Shiloh” or the bluegrass-meets-Far East sounds of “Ebb & Flow” brings the ghosts of long past into this bedroom pop serenade.
It makes you want to experience this album in a large church where sound bounces off into infinity and the lush musical relationship between Lamb and Swain are that much more bonded.
Case Studies – The World Is Just A Shape To Fill The Night Out (Sacred Bones)
Case Studies
The World Is Just A Shape To Fill The Night Out
Sacred Bones
Rating: 3 out of 5
Link: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Case-Studies/129211387138861?sk=wall
Dutchess & The Duke songwriter, Jesse Lortz, does well on his own. He’s creepy in the way that when you listen to his songs, you feel like you are settling down for a night of dimly lit oak-stained folk tales with a road-weary croon. The way the acoustic flows around is words are mesmerizing. I would be fine with just that. But other vocals have to chime in and that’s when things get cluttered, despite some efforts to conceal the punchiness of dual harmonies as in the opener, “From The Blade Of My Love.”
You will find this album to be about community. You take away the painstaking process of solitude that Lortz is known for by inviting some friends and musicians to hole up in a cabin. The World Is Just A Shape To Fill The Night Out is the result.
The immediacy of this album does not come until the end of the second song, when the kick drum finally enters and the band feels complete. But it’s not a common practice on this album.
The collective wanders through folk (“You Folded Up My Blanket Like We Were Already Lovers,”) bedroom rock (“Secrets”) and ‘60s hippie singalongs (“My Silver Hand”), all with interest. However, I conclude that the experience itself was more impressive than the final product.
Case Studies: Daggers from Case Studies on Vimeo.
