Here’s this week’s dose of new music. First up is the new one from Phantom Runners. It’s their first release in a year, and it’s the first to feature the vocal talents of Brooke Bailey. One more first – the track is called First Time: Continue reading
Here’s this week’s new music round up. We’re kicking things off with news of the second album from the brilliant Fiction Aisle who completely unexpectedly put out a new album last week. It’s called Fuschia Days, and is available as a download or on very limited cd. There’s only two cds left – that’s how limited it is. Where The Fiction Aisle’s first album was a huge orchestral widescreen affair, the new album feels more sparse, but no less lacking in vision. A fantastic progression. Continue reading
We’re catching up a bit with new music at the moment, so we’re going to dive straight in, starting off with Sea Bed, fresh from going down a storm at Glastonbury, here’s their new single Young: Continue reading
After a bit of an absence because a teething baby is higher up my priorities than writing blog posts, we’re back with some new music and not just new tracks, but whole albums.
Fall Forever by Fear of Men came out on Kanine Records on June 3rd, the same day as the band played a live instore at Resident to promote the record. The album is a follow up to 2014’s Loom and shows the band branching out sonically and lyrically. Jess Weiss went into the process of writing with a desire to develop her own voice, rather than hiding behind metaphors and oblique references, and the album features a much broader aural palette compared to it’s predecessor. We already posted up the video for Island, so here’s the video for one of the other tracks, Trauma:
We’ve been fans of Moulettes for a long long time at Brighton Music Blog, and their performance at One Church confirmed that they still deserve a place in our hearts. Moulettes also played a live instore at Resident to promote Preternatural, the week before Fear of Men and are now off on tour all around the world, currently in Canada. Moving further and further away from their folk roots, the new material could be described as prog, with it’s switching time signatures and 70s sounding guitars. Here’s the lead single from the album, Behemoth:
Last of all we have news of the debut album from Phoria, which has been a long time coming – their first EP appeared in 2013. Volition was released on 3rd June on X Novo, and the album launches (in Brighton and London) were meant to be taking place this week. Sadly, Phoria main man Trewin Howard is out of action, so the gigs have been postponed for now. We’ll bring you details of the rescheduled dates as we have them. In the meantime, here’s Loss, which has been suggested to us as one of the standout tracks:
Here’s this week’s dose of new music. First up is Heaven by Martha Gunn, who I assume isn’t made up of bar staff from the pub on Lewes Road (although they may well be), but are also named after the Prince Regent’s best known dipper. Continue reading
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Ellie Ford launched her debut album ‘The Other Sun’ at Bleach in Brighton on 22nd April. Brighton Music Blog were there to share in the fun. Opener Alabaster dePlume decided to play in the middle of the room without amplification, … Continue reading
Photograph by Biguisize
There are a lot of excellent women writing and recording songs around Brighton at the moment and Elin Ivarsson has joined the top rank with her self-titled debut album, released last month on local Hidden Trail Records.
Opening song ‘Leaving song’ is a beguiling pop-folk ditty, wherein the singer proclaims she’d rather be alone than be with the person she’s leaving. It’s arrangement is light and joyful, and typifies Elin’s Swedish-born sound.
Thereafter the ten songs on her album pick up a delightful range of soulful, folk-influenced tunes. Elin has a warm deep tone, sometimes sounding like she’s telling fairy-tales, like in the charming dancing ‘Luka’, other times sparse and moving. There are some beautiful arrangements to the songs, with gorgeous strings from the likes of Willkommen’s Will Calderbank, which make a song like ‘Lotty’ delightful.
Other favourites include the excellent ‘Sunday 5am’ with it’s keen observations on bedsit living and references to The Well-Tempered Clavier and Edgar Allen Poe. Or ‘Laurels’, a bouncy joyful meditation on living and loving, with some gorgeous violin from Andrew Stuart-Buttle. Or ‘Another day will come’, a yearning moving discourse between movement and stillness, of freedom and entrapment. However, it’s hard to pick a favourite as the full set is uniformly excellent.
All in all a very find debut and well worth your time.
Listen to ‘Leaving Song’ below, recorded for Stripped Back Bare sessions. You can hear the full album and purchase it from the Bandcamp website https://hiddentrailrecords.bandcamp.com/album/elin-ivarsson
There’s a whole crop of terrific female singers coming out with some beautiful records in Brighton at the moment and we’ll try to blog about a few of them.
First off is this lovely EP by the enigmatic Jane Gilbert. We don’t know much about Jane except that she’s originally from Scotland but now living in Brighton and she’s produced a beautiful collection of songs that excel at promoting her gorgeous voice and top class songwriting chops. Sounding something like a cross between early 70s California and mid-2000s Portland, but very much her own self, think Joni MItchell crossed with Alela Diane The former illustrated well in the opening song ‘Better Man’, the video for which is below, and the latter in the superb sparsely delicate closer ‘Coloured Sky’.
You can hear Jane perform her songs live at The Greys on Tuesday 22nd March (free entry).
And her EP can be purchased for download over at bandcamp
An album of remixes from folk duo Lutine seems surprising. And it is.
In 2014 Lutine released an excellent album of traditional folk-styled songs called ‘White Flowers’, featuring some beautiful harmonies and subtle instrumentation recorded in the church at Stanmer village. Now they’ve taken the bones of those tracks and invited a range of different artists to try their hand at remixing them for a collection titled ‘Died of Love’. The results are quite extraordinary and haunting.
The opening track below remixed by Laura Cannell is in some ways the most traditional, although the Sarah Angliss and Stephen Hiscock mix of the sublime ‘Sallow Tree’ also falls within their earie early-70s British horror movie soundtrack vein. After that it gets even weirder, with a ghostly mix of ‘Death and the Lady’ by Michael Tanner, an hypnotic choral approach by Kemper Norton and a brilliant brutal noise-fest by Bela Emerson, before the music descends into some dance-based mixes until ending on Pete Wiggs brilliant reinvention of the gorgeous ‘So It Goes’.
This is a highly original and fascinating reinvention of the folk idiom and a memorable release from the Brighton duo of Heather Minor and Emma Morton which is well worth searching out.
‘Died of Love’ is available to download from March 4th from Front & Follow
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The Little Way festival is an innovation of a team led by Philippe Nash and Harvey Herman, aiming to create a new simple music festival with a homely local community vibe. And over the course of an 11 hour day … Continue reading
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