neo-folk

Kate Bush: The Ninth Wave (1985)

2015/02/20

Kate Bush Now, this, this is what you call an end to a magnificent run. Releasing an album, Hounds of Love, in 1985, that if you’d have dropped it today, yesterday, and many days in the future it would trump whatever was out there, and be the de facto best album of the year. So,…
Big Country: In A Big Country (1983)

2015/02/16

Big Country I’ll ask for forgiveness on this account. Sometimes in the journey to get somewhere, you lose track of time. In this instance, I completely misplaced my timeline for one supremely important neo-folk band. Perhaps one of the best, and last of a dying breed, the true quintessential Scottish folk-rock band: Big Country. If,…
The Waterboys: This is the Sea (1985)

2015/02/12

Mike Scott and the Waterboys Have you heard the Big Music? You probably already have. Its the music seemingly heard everywhere now, but not quite. Larger than life, its music that aims for the most tired of tropes: the epic song. It does so, be it by layering gigantic amounts of instruments and production tricks,…
Cocteau Twins: Donimo (1984)

2015/02/10

The Cocteau Twins I’m going to introduce you to a word you’ve probably never heard before: glossolalia. This word means speaking in tongues. A very recent creation, dating to late 1800s, it was a word invented by linguists to understand why vocabulary which we normally understand, can sound so incomprehensible or unrecognizable when spoken or…
Virginia Astley: A Summer Long Since Passed (1983)

2015/02/06

Here’s to another unheralded and quite forgotten one. In the summer of 1983, a humble, charming bit of pastoral neo-folk music was released. Mixing field recordings, piano, guitar, flute, and, very sparingly, voice, a young woman presented a breathtaking idea of how a certain English feeling can reveal itself to you. Back then, Virginia opened…
Richard and Linda Thompson: Wall of Death (1982)

2015/02/04

Richard and Linda Thompson – 1980 In the same year as Kate Bush was heralding a new apex for neo-folk music, one of its original visionaries was turning off all the lights from its prior impetus. You see, in 1982, Richard and Linda Thompson released probably one of your parents or cool elder’s favorite English…
(Album of the Month) January 2015: Kate Bush – The Dreaming (1982)

2015/01/30

Kate Bush – 1982 You know January, a month so long, a month that appears so taxing at first, whether temporal or corporally, is a month that allows for something few others do: reflection. Reflection, seems to be one of those double-edge words. As much as it it is defined as something that gives back…
Public Image Limited: Flowers of Romance (1981)

2015/01/28

John Lydon – 1981 Pretend you never heard of a band called The Sex Pistols. Pretend you’ve never heard of a man called Johnny Rotten. Let’s pretend his career started as this unique artist called John Lydon who founded this brilliant band called The Public Image Limited. Forget that you’ve even heard of Metal Box…
Penguin Cafe Orchestra: Air á Danser (1981)

2015/01/26

Now, this is the right time to bring Simon Jeffes’s Penguin Cafe Orchestra back again. Back in 1976, no one was quite ready for their Neoclassical style of chamber folk music. His vision of combining various worldly folk traditions under one shapeshifting sound created a template that touches on a lot of modern post-rock and…
The Durutti Column: Never Known (1981)

2015/01/23

The Durutti Column – 1980 Now we’re rounding out to the present. We’re heading into the realm where English folk music goes beyond its traditional boundaries and attains a spectral essence inflecting what it would have sung before. Now comes the realization, that as far removed new folk artists are from their greener rural past,…