New Mixtape and Weekly Digest (Reviews and News)

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We kicked off the week with our Monday Morning Brew playlist, an hour and 43 minutes of tunes which included ‘Garbhóg’, the first track from Trá Pháidin’s new album Cloch ‘s Claí (trans. Stone & Wall), their first record to be released by World of Echo.

There was also music from Jon McKiel, Laura Veirs, Ancient Infinity Orchestra, More Eaze, Nora Stanley, Allison De Groot and Rich Ruth, Niamh Regan and more.

You can read that post here:

The Monday Morning Brew #168

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Aug 17

We kick off this week’s Monday Morning Brew with ‘Garbhóg’, the first track from Trá Pháidin’s new album Cloch ‘s Claí (trans. Stone & Wall), their first record to be released by World of Echo. If you’re new to their music, check out our review of their last album

This week’s Mixtape is made up of entirely new releases, from indie folk to the ambient and experimental. From our recent album reviews, we’ve got music from Elanor Moss, Alex Dupree and Hana Stretton. Plus, we have new tracks from Jake Xerxes Fussell, FRMR, Arborist, Awen Ensemble, Biita Houdei, and Clara Mann.

Listen Here

The following are excerpts/summaries from our album reviews. Please click on a title to read in full.

by Tobias Furlong

Tiarn is a gorgeous sophomore record by Australian ambient-folk producer, composer and multi-instrumentalist Hana Stretton. It follows her 2023 debut album Soon, which, like its predecessor, comes alive off the record, existing as a living and breathing tapestry of sound. Where Soon found its focus on the fires and floods of the Australian bush, the latest project casts its gaze on the endless shores of the Pacific Ocean, where Stretton’s boundless textural explorations reflect a world suspended in blue.

Living in isolation near the ocean, overlooking the winter migration of Whales, Stretton would regularly swim for 20 minutes during the ‘blue hour’. Ideas would crystallise into existence as she submerged into icy salt water, and melodies would come alive as she recorded into the night. At its core, Tiarn is a manifestation of ecological grief and a search for connection in an ever-changing world.

by Thomas Blake

One of Elanor Moss’s many prodigious gifts is her ability to balance a quiet, subtle mode of expression with a searing intensity of feeling. It’s a gift she has had since the very start of her recording career. ‘I want to drink til I’m too drunk to think,’ she sang on Sober, the opening track of her first EP, 2022’s Citrus. It’s a line you could imagine coming from the mouth of a grouchy country and western old-timer or a partied-out rocker, but Moss delivers it with winsome and slightly resigned delicacy, as if it is something she has thought long and hard over but that in the end is an unavoidable part of her existence. Citrus and its 2023 follow-up Cosmic are full of such lyrical knife-edges, usually accompanied by soft swells of acoustic guitar and occasional hushed horns or shimmering synths.

The Knife, The Needle is her first full-length album, and in many ways it is a continuation of those two EPs, except that the lyrics are more refined and the emotional hit is harder. Moss and her guitar are accompanied by various horns and strings, and the arrangements create an all-enveloping sound in which the little lyrical razor blades are skilfully hidden. Not for nothing does the album’s title recall sharpness and pain and, perhaps, narcotic oblivion. Sarah Waiting in the Car begins with studiedly mundane detail and a gentle arrangement (not unlike Nick Drake), before the situation develops into something messier and morally murkier. Opening track Fixer begins with some pastoral horns and tender guitar, but the lyrics are beset by longing and hardship and fear of commitment. Hope is present here too: the needle of the title turns out not to symbolise pain or addiction so much as mending and healing.

by Thomas Blake

Texan songwriter Alex Dupree has been making witty, warm and criminally underrated outsider-folk masterpieces for a couple of decades, both as a solo artist and previously with The Trapdoor Band. Likely to appeal to fans of David Berman, Cass McCombs, Bob Dylan or Townes Van Zandt, he actually sounds very little like any of those people, or like anyone else for that matter. In a career that has seen him move between country twang, softly-strummed folk and soulful confession, his calling card has always been a completely unique eye for lyrical detail. He seems content to exist on the margins, unwilling to compromise, in the lineage of picaresque poet-jester-troubadours that thankfully didn’t end when Michael Hurley died last year.

So it’s fitting that one of the two covers on Talking to the Dog is Hurley’s You’re a Dog, Don’t Talk To Me. Dupree largely eschews the low-fi counter-cultural shenanigans of the original in favour of a more tender delivery and some updated lyrics. In Hurley’s hands, the song is mostly funny. When Dupree sings it, it retains some of that humour, but it’s coated in the same kind of sad, golden sense of wonder that Bill Callahan can achieve. The album’s other cover is perhaps more unexpected: a reworking of Scott Walker’s On Your Own Again, which cleaves surprisingly close to the original in terms of pacing and feel. Shorn of the swooping orchestral accompaniments that Walker favoured, it instead relies on delicate piano and a cunning use of space. It also reveals Dupree as an excellent singer in his own right: the final hushed, wavering note lingering in the deserted night air long after the song has finished.

by Alex Neilson

ve gotta level with you. I’d never heard of Marvin Tate before I was sent Controlled Burn for review. His name sounded like he might have played right back for Preston North End in the early 2000s. OK, I’ll give it a go. But only ‘cos I’m a really nice guy. But I’m telling you now: if this is some earnest folky poppycock, then I’m going to go ape shit with a jar of Nutella and my bare fingers.

But, boy, was I wrong on every level. Mr Tate is like a one-person Mount Rushmore on the Chicago poetry scene. His storied career spans decades and artforms. He’s collaborated with members of Tortoise and Wilco and founded the experimental jazz/poetry collective D-Settlement, as well as winning various awards for poetry and solo art exhibitions in some of America’s most garlanded institutions.

That’s all well and good, but what has he done for me lately?

Well, his new album Controlled Burn (on Amalgam Records) is a hallucinogenic portal into a world that’s similar to ours, but the furniture is rearranged, and the pavement convulses beneath your feet like piano keys and shadowy figures stalk the corridors of your neurosis. Opening track Up At 6 has a gorgeous, sun-bursting synth that’s pitch-shifted to sound like it’s continually melting in on itself, with Tate intoning “Happiness is strange/ Happiness is strange… I called you by your dead name/ My bad”. The slap-back delay on Tate’s voice and kaleidoscopic accompaniment give a dual sense of expansiveness and claustrophobia, setting the tone for the rest of the album.

Johnny and Lillie Flynn have announced “Beam Cottage,” their first collaborative album, due 6th November via Transgressive Records. Produced by Charlie Andrew, it features new songs, covers of childhood favourites as well as reworkings from Johnny’s catalogue. Listen to “The Ghost of O’Donahue”, a song written in Ireland almost 20 years ago but now cast in a meaningful new light.

Jake Xerxes Fussell shares “Boney” and “Boll Weevil,” two new singles from “The Old Beloved Path,” out September 18th via Fat Possum Records. “Boney” resurrects a rarely-recorded maritime chantey about Napoleon, while “Boll Weevil” draws from Charley Patton and Blind Willie McTell, reimagining a traditional standard about the invasive bug, but “like so many of us, he’s looking for a home.”

Andrew Farmer, aka FRMR, has shared ‘Echinacea’, the new single from his second album, Ochre, out on August 28th via Bluestack Records. The nine-track album continues the ecological songwriting of his 2021 debut, Amelanchier, and broadens its sound alongside contributions from Michael Mormecha, Linley Hamilton, Duke Special, Luke Sital-Singh, and more.

Arborist shares “The Taming of Horses,” and announces his first self-produced album, Looking For Love, due via Fika Recordings. Belfast songwriter Mark McCambridge wrote the track during late nights watching Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man. Lush Hammond organ gives the song a sprawling, sophisticated feel — simultaneously disquieting and uplifting.

Clara Mann has shared a video for “All My Devotion”, the second single from her forthcoming album ‘Wishbone’, out October 23rd via state51. She shared: “I wrote it about my instinct to give everything to someone”, and it follows her lead single “News From Home”. Mann performs a live BBC Radio 2 session for Mark Radcliffe tonight, with UK and European tour dates this autumn.

Biita Houdei shares “Night Fright,” the third single from her debut album “This Bed Was Made For Me”. The track explores parallel relationships, one rooted in difficulty and turmoil, the other blossoming into something effortless and gentle. It’s accompanied by a horror-tinged video directed by Seth Naugle and Sam Falconi.

On “Run Around,” Chase Elodia turns love-song clichés inside out. The Brooklyn drummer and poet’s vocal debut, “Real Ones,” is due October 23rd on Long Echo Records. After hearing him sing, you can understand why he has been compared to Arthur Russell — a relationship heightened by his new single’s strong percussive elements, calling to mind the groove-driven avant-garde of Russell’s World of Echo.

On their new EP, The Walls Around Ballyfin, the Leeds-based septet Awen Ensemble set sail for Ireland. Listen to their mesmerising lead single and title track, on which they bring a new lease of life to a forgotten folk song and a tune written by their drummer Eddie Bowes’s great-grandfather in County Laoise, Ireland.

More soon