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Dark Dark Dark - Wild Go
Monday 18 April 2011
Chamber-folk outfit explores a soundworld that’s entirely theirs on album number two.
This second album from Minneapolis chamber-folk outfit Dark Dark Dark has taken its time to cross the Atlantic, having emerged stateside to warm approval back in October 2010. But the wait has certainly been worth it. Picked up in the UK by Manchester-based indie Melodic, whose roster features the fine likes of Working for a Nuclear Free City and The Longcut, this is a collection that clicks with immediate clarity, the sort of album that you feel you’ve known forever on the very first listen.
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Essie Jain - Until the Light of Morning
Friday 25 March 2011
New York-based folk artist’s third album is a beautiful set of baby-soothing songs.
Well this certainly isn’t the third album fans of New York-based English singer Essie Jain might’ve been expecting. Rather than follow her two previous collections with further evolved excursions into indie-folk, she here presents a deliberately stripped-back collection designed, quite specifically, to lull a baby to sleep. The good news for any puffy-eyed parents reading these words: there seems every chance that Until the Light of Morning will work a treat.
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Sharon Van Etten - Epic
Friday 29 October 2010
Melds pedal steel and electronica into something really rather gorgeous.
Sharon Van Etten's own description of her songs as "sad prairie folk music" is in part accurate; certainly the seven tracks that make up her latest offering, Epic, own all the wide-skied wistfulness of the American folk tradition. But such statements do little justice to Van Etten's ear for near-pop catchiness – single One Day, for example, runs at a pleasingly radio-friendly lollop, spurred on a little by shades of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
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The Watson Twins - Talking to You, Talking to Me
Tuesday 16 March 2010
The pair are expectedly strong of voice, but much here comprises an icy cool listen.
The presence of twins in pop music – bless their shared DNA – has a somewhat chequered history. The intimacy between them can often trigger warmth and playfulness, but there are oceans of difference between Kim and Kelley Deal’s brilliant Breeders or Jez and Andy Williams’ Doves and the saccharine pop of Bros and The Cheeky Girls. Leigh and Chandra Watson, identical 35-year-olds born and raised in Kentucky, but now living in California, aim to be in the former camp, making alt-folk and country of a rather classy order. But instead of being an engaging, lovely exercise in family values, Talking to You, Talking to Me is an icy cold listen.
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