Album: Brigid Mae Power - Dream From The Deep Well

Irish singer-songwriter’s fourth album is her most direct yet

The cover versions on Dream From The Deep Well include “I Know Who is Sick,” most familiar from the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Maken interpretation, and “Down by the Glenside,” which The Dubliners incorporated into their repertoire. The first opens the album, the second closes it. Between, amongst the original compositions, there is also an adaptation of Tim Buckley’s “I Must Have Been Blind.”

Album: Bob Dylan - Shadow Kingdom

The Song and Dance Man's lockdown-era live stream resurfaces

Dylan’s Shadow Kingdom first crossed our paths in July 2021, his first streaming event, and coming little more than a year after the garden of unearthly delights that was Rough and Rowdy Ways. To enter this kingdom, you were given a key code for $25, and allowed fifty minutes, 13 songs, and the chance to revisit over the following 48 hours.

Album: Shirley Collins - Archangel Hill

★★★★ SHIRLEY COLLINS - ARCHANGEL HILL The voice of English traditional music takes stock

The voice of English traditional music takes stock

Mount Caburn is east of Lewes in Sussex. Shirley Collins’s stepfather used to call it Archangel Hill. The site of an Iron Age hill fort, it was defended with a ditch during the Roman and Saxon periods. In World War II, a gun emplacement was positioned there. While physically strategic, it’s a spiritual landmark for Shirley Collins – a marker in the story of her life.

Songlines Encounters, Kings Place review - moments of magic

★★★★ SONGLINES ENCOUNTERS, KINGS PLACE Moments of magic

A night of immersive polyphonic magic with Georgia's Ialoni and the Persian-West African fusion of Constantinople

These encounters are ones that may lead to lifelong relationships, with the halls at Kings Place this coming weekend filled with music from Mali, Colombia, Turkey, Georgia, Estonia, Tibet and a woodland in Sussex.

Tallinn Music Week 2023 review - when music is unavoidably the language of freedom

Electropop, folk, yacht rock and more delights in Estonia’s capital city

Estonia’s Mart Avi styles himself as “the twilight samurai of alternative pop”. He creates “nowhere-somewhere music, mapping uncharted territories between avant-pop and timeless grandeur”. The characterisations are issued via AVICORP, his internet presence.

Album: Paul Simon - Seven Psalms

★★★★ PAUL SIMON - SEVEN PSALMS At 81 Paul Simon's meticulous poetry still has power to stop you in your tracks

At 81 Paul Simon's meticulous poetry still has power to stop you in your tracks

Paul Simon is an ornery bugger. Full of awkwardness and perversity as a person, seemingly hugely detached, but as an artist capable of as much tenderness and directness as just about anyone out there. Capable of making world-changing artistic statements but queering his pitch with bizarrely, unnecessarily reactionary statements or actions. Really, a very weird man.

Album: Lucy Farrell - We Are Only Sound

The acclaimed folk artist makes her solo debut with an exquisite break-up album

Lucy Farrell has a singular voice, contained and controlled but subtle and expressive. Since graduating from Newcastle’s folk course in the noughties she’s performed and recorded as a duo with Jonny Kearney, as one quarter of the BBC Folk Award-winning Furrow Collective, alongside further musical adventures with Carthy, Oates, Farrell & Young, and Eliza Carthy’s Wayward Band.