My knowledge of folk is limited, I find it hard to listen to the British working-class stories of toil, trouble and industry, but I admire and respect the roots of the genre. The instruments; acoustic and organic, the lyrics; heartfelt and honest and the genres popularity grows by the week.
What Colorado-based singer/songwriter Gregory Alan Isakov has delivered here is poignant and interesting, it’s recognisable but immediately it feels an evolution from what folk, particularly in this country, is. I find there to be such a fine line between American Folk and Country music that the two often intertwine, which, if you’re a fan of either genre is great news because the songs on Evening Machines will keep you interested and engaged. But alongside the pedal steel, banjo and all manner of percussion sits keyboards, electronic drums and electric guitar.
Songs written against a backdrop of vast space and farming communities (Isakov shares his time as a musician with being a farmer). This is the type of music that evokes images of sitting on the front porch on a summer’s evening with your sweetheart alongside you, overlooking a lake as the sun sets and the stars emerge over the pine trees. Evening Machines is a perfect tonic to the hustle and bustle of modern life and presents an opportunity to stop and listen.
The songs are arranged thoughtfully and with care and slowly they creep into your mind. From the album’s opener ‘Berth’ (a song about immigration) through the wonderful ‘Dark, Dark, Dark’ to the personal closer ‘Wings In All Black’ the album manages to hold on to the listener and calmly guide you through a world of characters and layered music.
As I wrote before, my knowledge of folk is limited, but if this is where folk is heading I’ll buy a ticket and take my seat.
Gregory Alan Isakov is touring the UK from 4thto 9thDecember with shows in London, Bristol, Dublin, Glasgow and Manchester.
Beauty in Chaos is a strange and intriguing prospect and like anything deserving of such a description is hard to easily pin down. Too fleeting to be a supergroup, more organic than merely a curated project, too original and forward thinking to be merely a rose-spectacled look at the past…it skips fleetingly past all those ideas, echoing all but committing to none. Personally it feels as if someone has snuck in to my house, rummaged through my vinyl collection to see what I like and brought a large selection of those bands and artists together to make an album just for me. They even put everything back in the right place afterwards.
If Two-Tone was the perfect storm of the imported Jamaican ska and reggae sounds and the punk spirit and wild energy that was fermenting in British inner cities in the late 70’s then Rude Rebels is nothing short of a continuation of that story. Far from being a nostalgic look back it is a glorious next instalment from people who helped define it and champion it in the first place.
Stock in the 
If this were a competition I would already be awarding additional points for the band having such a cool and interesting name. But this is a music review and as such things can’t be so easily measured but I can award interesting words. Words like strange, beguiling, hypnotic, exploratory perhaps even challenging, all meant in their most positive of applications.
After such a long time of writing music reviews you sort of get an inkling, a first impression before even listening to the music of an album as it falls out of the review pile and under the pen whether it is going to be merely another day at the office or it will end up as the latest addition to your own record collection. Okay, the name White Robot might sound a bit rock or dance but anyone calling their album The Belligerent North Star has my interest piqued immediately. I also like tasteful artwork, spacious music, genre-splicing, graceful harmonies, ambient vibes, female vocals and music which looks forward to new horizons rather than past glories.
There are many reasons for making records that are purely covers. They range from thoughts of paying homage to the iconic songs that have featured heavily in your life to more cynical ideas of a mere cash-in. Sarah Sharp is very much in the former camp on that axis. The art of course is to be able to bring just enough that is new to the songs but still retain the qualities that made the songs iconic in the first place and again that is exactly what she gets so right on this 6 track release.
A strange title for a strange album. And I mean that in the nicest possible of ways. Strange is good, strange is interesting, strange is the opposite of safe, strange is unpredictable. Strange is often great and there are certainly many great aspects to this album. The first great thing is its approach towards genres…
I Could Careless was a great low-slung rocker of a song but for me this is the more interesting of 
