New Music 2017 - Part 1 - Holly Macve - Golden Eagle

A break from lists and an opportunity to start looking forward to 2017 releases.
I actually started to write this about a fortnight ago when the schedule became clear but I soon ran into a problem. I saw Holly Macve live during the summer but could I find the photos? No!
I knew they were not amongst a few lost to a faulty memory card because the issue was resolved by that time. Just now I had an idea - by this time I was using two cameras interchangeably, one much more than the other and it was the first time that I had such luxury. It turned out that these pictures had been taken with 'the other one' and I hadn't looked for them where they were to be found even though I had downloaded all the images from both devices. Mea culpa.
With that little mystery solved here she is. As I said ten years ago, when this blog project commenced, I don't have the time or the inclination to review things that I don't care for. My listening tastes may have changed over time but that is a completely different matter. 

Holly Macve, Garden stage, End Of The Road Festival, 4 September 2016.

Her début album 'Golden Eagle' is released by Bella Union on 3 March 2017 and this is the track-listing.

White Bridge
Corner of My Mind
Heartbreak Blues
Shell
All of Its Glory
Timbuktu
Fear
No One Has the Answers
Golden Eagle
Sycamore Tree

Taken from the album, this is 'No One Has The Answers'.

A meander through music...

This isn't quite the virtual road or rail trip through music that I have been mentioning in my plans for some while, though I expect I'll come to that sooner rather than later. It's just a spur-of-the-moment thing and I don't really know where I'm headed. Its genesis was last week when I had been listening to lots of stuff that is new to me and, every so often, something quite unexpected ended up in my path.
It really started just fifteen minutes walk from home with live music at the Grain Bar Roots Sessions in my home town of Frome, played by an acoustic trio from down the road in Devon. This is folk (of the English variety) but not quite just that. Amongst the summer rain, so typical of England, touches of blues and even jazz seep in through the cracks whilst the stories told are relevant to those in almost any place or time. That trio is Velvet & Stone and they were touring their six-song début release.

The Storm - Velvet & Stone (self released, 8 December 2015).

Not a weak track on this and how this band has passed under my radar completely requires an investigation. These are not traditional songs but new songs that embody traditional themes and the distinction is a rather important one.

The next is certainly the result of a improbable set of coincidences. It all started with a local (but not particularly so to me) community radio show called FNARW (Folk is Not A Rude Word) that is primarily broadcast on Hailsham FM (Sussex, England) but is also available (almost) worldwide on Mixcloud here. Chris Giles, the presenter, cited his awareness of this duo as a result of 'networking'. I'm going to continue that theme...
He introduced me to this next act and played a couple of tracks from it yesterday. I couldn't wait to find out more. This one is a collection of folk songs revisited and reinterpreted:

Wolf Hunter - The Creek Rocks (self released, 2016).

The Creek Rocks is husband and wife team Cindy Woolf and Mark Bilyeu both from the territory covered by the Ozark Mountains (they are similar in altitude to the "mountains" in the UK so not Rocky mountains or Alps style) but cover extensive tracts of southern Missouri and north central and north western parts of Arkansas. Wolf Hunter is their first truly collaborative work although both have released music before.
It is released on vinyl, CD and d/l but finding the physical versions in the UK is a slight issue at the moment. I rather like the idea of buying the vinyl for myself as a birthday present, even if it has to ship from the US. The album certainly deserves a listen and you can listen to five tracks from it here.

Last but not least is this news from today, about new music from an artist possibly better known on both sides of the Atlantic than either of the aforementioned. This is the follow up to 2014 self-titled début Arc Iris.

Moon Saloon - Arc Iris (19 August, Bella Union in the EU and possibly also the UK too).

The first track released from the second LP from Jocie Adams and her cohort is Kaleidoscope. I'm guessing that the title might serve as a good guide to the rest of the offering.

Arc Iris, The Garden Stage, End Of The Road Festival, 6 September 2014.

New Music 2015 - Part 79 - Lanterns On The Lake - Beings

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, the release of new studio LPs in the two months before Christmas was something of a rarity. That is not so much the case now and for a variety of reasons.

A band that I have followed, both live and recorded as well as with mentions in these scribblings, for almost as long as I can remember is Lanterns On The Lake. Hailing from Northumberland, Lanterns On The Lake comprises Hazel Wilde, Paul Gregory, Oliver Ketteringham and Bob Allan.

Beings - Lanterns On The Lake. Released  13 November Bella Union (UK) and PIAS (N. America).

The second and latest single taken from it is 'Through The Cellar Door'. Theirs has never been music to party to and probably never will be. It is perfect to share with a small group of friends and then remember that some of the best in things in life are the simplest and least extravagant. That approach, as beautiful as it is, doesn't square with the cult of ruthless self-promotion that the top-end music industry regards as normal.


It is certainly none the worse for that.

End Of The Road Festival is 10!

I have to say that this last weekend was only my seventh EOTR (2009 - 2015) and I met at least two with a complete record. I have my ticket for EOTR 2016, however. I think that this goes bare-bones statistics to show just how people that have experienced it once tend to become attached to it in some way. It is intense because there is so much there and so it is tiring, but in the best possible sense.

By Sunday afternoon even the resident Larmer Tree Gardens peacocks were chilled.

The limited music on offer on Thursday evening was delayed by an hour by the sudden unavailability of the band scheduled to open the proceedings. That was not to matter one little bit when, at 7:30pm, the now-festival-openers took to the Tipi stage. 

Mammút

When a band comes from Iceland and is also signed to Bella Union then all worries just melt away.

About seventy-two hours later, on the Tipi stage early on Sunday evening, the wonder that is EOTR was effectively book-ended by what was for me a total chance discovery. It is why festivals matter so very much.

Irish artist Lisa O'Neill playing, at this point, baritone ukulele.

Now I just have to get to grips with all the rest of it. 

End Of The Road 2014 - Part 2

Shortly before I headed off to the idyll that is Larmer Tree Gardens and the venue for End of The Road I posted a "must see" list of eight acts that does not include any of the three, mentioned in my post yesterday, that I saw at both Green Man 2014 and EOTR 2014. This is how I got on with that. I saw the complete sets of seven out of eight; the exception was Pink Mountaintops and largely because of a time (and day!) scheduling change, but I still saw a few songs in the Big Top tent on Friday.
Lily and Madeleine opened proceedings on The Garden stage on Saturday morning.

They played songs from the forthcoming second LP 'Fumes' and, from what I was able to tell when talking to people during the weekend, gained a whole load of new fans too.

On Saturday evening Marissa Nadler took to the Tipi stage, the smallest of the four main music stages. She has been on my list of "ones to see" for an age, or so it seems, and never more so than since the release of her most recent LP 'July' in February 2014.

This is her seventh studio album in a run that started with 'Ballads of Living and Dying' in 2004. It is the first to have a UK release on Bella Union. Regular readers will be well aware of the importance that I attach to this.

Much the same could be said of Liverpool trio Stealing Sheep since the 2012 début LP 'Into The Diamond Sun'. I mentioned the dragon yesterday.

Stealing Sheep playing The Garden Stage on a gloriously sunny Sunday afternoon. The songs are short, sharply conceived and based for the most part around a percussive format. In the moment it was hard to imagine anything more perfect.  

Stealing Sheep, Tipi Stage, early Monday morning.

Until that is Stealing Sheep became one of very few acts I have seen play two live sets within twelve hours. It is things like this and, more than one might realise, the people you meet that make festivals very special.

Cyclical thoughts on music

This post started with a comment I wrote on Facebook yesterday. That was itself born out of a question somebody asked me the day before and, therefore, put me in mind of something that I had half-remembered a few months ago. In some ways it has to do with the forthcoming Record Store Day 2014 (19 April) [RSD] too:

I've just been exploring the dark (often only metaphorically but sometimes also musically), dusty depths of my music collection. I have found plenty of dead woodlice and even more albums that I had forgotten that I owned. This is good - the albums that is, not so much the moribund crustaceans.
To tell the truth a few of the albums would have better remained forgotten in the sense that ignorance (or merely forgetfulness) is bliss and I shall not dwell on them. Libraries should not work on that principle. 
Some of the LPs I was truly glad to discover again; 'Songs About People I Know', Stricken City's 2009 début album, was just one. The small dead spider stuck to the playing face of the CD was easily removed. It really shouldn't have gone there anyway. It did make me wonder, when listening to the CD after its removal, what has happened since the band split in 2010...
That is also how new things are found.

Whilst I am thinking about the direction this theme is heading, be aware that the direction of music was never very predictable when observed in retrospect. With RSD fast approaching, consider this article - 1o UK independent record shops to visit before you die. Of course I was going to mention this; one of the ten, Raves From The Grave, has its original store in my home town of Frome. It has more recently opened stores in Warminster and Bath too.
To be quite honest I got bogged down with this post for a couple of days but, just now that problem evaporated when I remembered about this. It also reminded me about just why the small stages at festivals, as well as support bands in general, are always at the top of my list of things to see. This is Oklahoma City based band Horse Thief playing End of The Road Festival 2012; Cameron Neal on guitar and vocals.

The début album, Fear In Bliss, is released today by Bella Union and Horse Thief is booked to play at End of The Road Festival 2014.
   

It is, of course, available on vinyl.

New Music 2014 - Part 9 - Denmark and New Zealand

This post on new music changes tack slightly. While both artists are primarily female singer-songwriters any direct connection with Americana is absent. In neither case is the album the first. I have already seen one of the two live and would much very like to see the other live too.

This is the new album (although it was actually released in 2013), Aventine, by Agnes Obel. Whilst she has been resident in Berlin for some years now she is from Denmark and her 2010 début album 'Philharmonics' is five-times 'platinum' in her home country but still, with worldwide sales approaching one million, she remains surprisingly unknown. Her début LP was a far cry from Scandinavian pop and this is even more so.

It is spacious, minimal, and sometimes very dark but not in any way depressing.

If one were to mention female artists from New Zealand, at the moment the most likely to come to mind would be Lorde (Ella Yellich O'Connor) and her album 'Pure Heroine'. That incidentally, in my opinion, is also one of the most inspired album titles and it is a fine album too, but not the one I intend to feature here. 

 'Brightly Painted One' is released (in the UK) by Bella Union on 31 March 2014.
   

This is acoustic, almost lighter-than-air, music but I know that it works because I have seen Tiny Ruins live at No Direction Home 2012, until which point I had no knowledge whatsoever. Suffice it to say that I hadn't forgotten about that.

Hollie Fullbrook, Electric Dustbowl stage, No Direction Home 2012.

Tiny Ruins is confirmed for End Of The Road 2014.

New Music 2014 - Part 5 - Arc Iris

'Singing So Sweetly' is the début single from band Arc Iris, the new project of former Low Anthem member Jocie Adams. Here it is:

The self-titled album Arc Iris will be released by Bella Union in the UK on 31 March and by Anti- Records (North America) on 1 April. Arc Iris will play in Bristol, UK, at The Louisiana on 6 May and this doesn't sound remotely like her former band. To say that it is eclectic, as some already have, is only the half of it.

The Low Anthem is also to release new music in 2014. Exciting times, yet again.

[to be continued soon]

New Music 2014 - Part 1 - Snowbird 'Moon'

I'm so glad that I can mention this now, but also that it is not released until 2014! I have never forgotten seeing Stephanie Dosen live at my first festival in the new era, Latitude 2007, performing songs mostly from her second album 'A Lily For The Spectre'.
Well, finally she is back with a band Snowbird that includes a very surprising line-up, and the album 'Moon' is to be released by Bella Union in early 2014 and to be quite honest I can't wait. This is an album that just has to be purchased on vinyl and I can't see that Bella Union will disappoint.

All that does not detract from the vocals however. This is the lead single from it:

New Music 2013 - Part 28 - three forthcoming albums

I was intending to continue with my commentary on EOTR 2013 this evening but have decided that, with the tidal wave of forthcoming new releases, I would look at a few that have caught my attention. In many cases the artists involved first came to my attention at one festival or another.

The first album is Until The Colours Run - Lanterns on The Lake (Bella Union, 7 October).

This is the follow up to the 2011 début Gracious Tide, Take Me Home and is, as the artwork attests, likely to be ideal music to accompany the long, dark evenings of autumn. The lead single for this second LP was Another Tale From Another English Town. It is currently available as a free download from amazon.co.uk here.

The next is Find An Arrow - Troubador Rose, a band that I saw live at Truck Festival 2013 and mentioned here.

This is released by Clubhouse Records on October 16.

Last but not least in this frequently largely acoustic trio is the second EP from north Somerset based three-piece Wolfhound. 

Tales of Truth & Lies is released by Jelli Records on September 21.

The next selection is likely to be much more oriented towards the electric-influenced end of the music space that I routinely inhabit.

New Music 2013 - Part 3 - Waiting For Something To Happen

What I suspected would be the case after hearing them play several new songs live at festival performances last summer has come to pass. Veronica Falls' second LP 'Waiting For Something To Happen' will appear, again on Bella Union, on February 4, 2013.  It will be available on vinyl and this, I believe, is the album cover artwork:

The lead song from it is one that was played both times that I saw them perform live last summer, which makes sense, and is 'Teenage'. I remember taking note that all the new songs were arresting.
Here it is...

...and also 'Teenage' performed live at No Direction Home 2012.

Bella Union is 15 (Part 2) - EOTR 2012

It has certainly taken me a little longer than I intended to put this, the second half of my account of Friday at End Of The Road Festival (EOTR), together but my ambition increased as I was writing the first part and I decided to include some stuff about bands that were performing but that for reasons of clashes I was unable to catch on August 31 but have had the good fortune to see live at other recent festivals.
I am indeed going to start with one of them, London four-piece 'Veronica Falls', fronted by Roxanne Clifford that appeared on the Big Top Stage at 20:30 on Friday (whilst I was watching 'The Low Anthem' on The Garden Stage).
Here they are performing at the first No Direction Home Festival at Welbeck Abbey back in June this year - a festival that has the same team as EOTR behind it.

  

They were excellent then, notably including several new songs not on the album, and I heard similarly good reports about their more recent performance at End Of The Road.

    

The act that had preceded them on this stage at EOTR was the Swedish electro-gaze duo of Fredrik Balck and Maria Lindén, with bass and drums for the live gig, otherwise known as 'I Break Horses' and touring their 2011 début album 'Hearts'. It proved to be a quite fascinating dichotomy. Whilst on the recorded version, to which I am listening as I write this, the music is really rather soothing and fittingly autumnal - evoking mists and mellow fruitfulness - the same proposition live is by turns squally and unpredictable; decidedly that of the darker side of autumn, of gales and lashing rain but also sudden, striking glimpses of the sun. Given the recent renewed interest in releasing live albums, which really ought to be the basis of a future post, this would certainly be an interesting prospect.

'I Break Horses', The Big Top Stage, EOTR 2012 performing Winter Beats.

  

The first Bella Union act to grace a stage on Friday was a four piece from Oklahoma that, in terms of live music certainly, was quite new to me. I was impressed...

'Horse Thief' live on the Big Top Stage at about 11:55 on Friday morning.

So good in fact that one way and another I saw them play two complete sets within the same calendar day - and there aren't very many acts or artists about which I can say that.

As for the next band what can I say? It is the third time I have seen them live at EOTR in four years... It is of course 'The Low Anthem'...

On the Garden Stage, where else, at 20:20 on Friday.

  

Then came the really big decision. 'Midlake ' headlining The Garden Stage at 21:45 or 'Beach House' doing that duty on the Woods Stage from 21:30. This was for me one of the easier decisions of the day and there was no chance that it would be anything other than watching all of one or all of the other. I have seen 'Midlake' twice live but never Baltimore's 'Beach House'...

'Beach House', The Woods Stage at EOTR 2012 at 22:03 Friday evening.

        

This was one set, of only a few, where I had no particular interest in being right at the front --- for me it was almost entirely about the music performed live and it certainly did not disappoint.

When they came off stage, at about 11pm, there came the realization that it was now 11 hours of live music today and with four hours more still to go - and then to do it all over again for the next two days.

Bella Union is 15 (Part 1) - EOTR 2012

Once upon a time, decades ago and when all was good in the world, there were record labels (remember those things) that you could rely on. I mean that in the sense that if they were on your list of labels to 'like' you could trust that a new release would be at the very least likeable and most possibly lovable even if totally unheard?
Why would one worry about the Iron Curtain, The Cold War or 'mutually assured destruction' when you have a comforting blanket like that?  Or indeed the anti-war artists nibbling at the mainstream... be it in response to events in Malaya, Korea, Vietnam or simply part of a vision of utopia? 
Well, while we haven't reached our panacea yet though the signs are not as poor as some might believe, at least we've got dependable labels back and that is a damn good start.
One of them, Bella Union, is fifteen now and its teenage birthday party was the Friday of End Of The Road Festival 2012 across all four music stages with bands from the Bella Union family. Like all the best parties it started rather early and finished rather late...

Here, on the Garden Stage at around 1pm, is Mountain Man.

Traffic issues, associated with The Dorset Steam Fair apparently, meant they arrived just in the nick of time and without any kit. They borrowed this guitar, that they had never seen before, and promptly nicknamed it 'The Cadillac' - for its white lacquer and shiny chrome fittings...
Suffice it to say that it was not what they would have chosen.

After this start you just knew that it was going to be a remarkable day.

  

Flitting between the various stages at End of The Road is happily very quick and easy to do so off we go to the tented Tipi Stage.  In this case there is a real problem... I didn't take enough pictures but here is one of the only two that I did.

Hannah Cohen, The Tipi Stage @ EOTR 2012.

Another Bella Union artist and her début album 'Child Bride' is quite something. The thing about Bella Union artists, however, is that they are unfailingly good when performing live.
Bella Union does not however just help new artists on the way by releasing their first album... indeed it only signed this one for her second, 'Time Traveller' (2011), although at 22 she is hardly an old-timer. I saw her live at Truck Festival last year, performing with a band, and am now of the opinion that she is better live as a solo artist as here for the band tended to overwhelm the purposefully-fragile beauty of her song-writing and never more so would it be true than of the brand new songs that she essayed last Friday. This really is Alessi in Wonderland and (the prospect of) album #3 is a reason to continue living.
  

Alessi's Ark (Alessi Laurent Marke)  on the Tipi Stage @ 15:05 Friday, August 31.
  

This next artist however, although only recently added to the Bella Union rôster, released his first solo album when I was just a toddler! That, and the next two, have recently been re-released on Bella Union and to go with it he has returned to live touring. He is one of the legendary American songwriters and, as it happens, also a gifted raconteur between those songs.

Van Dyke Parks - Garden Stage @ EOTR 2012, about 17:15 on Friday.

  

This of course just a part of the party and then only those bits of it that, being unable to be in more than one place at a time, I chose to see! Part 2 of that which I saw of the party will follow tomorrow.

Deer Shed Festival 3 - one week on

This is incredibly hard to write and not for the reasons that over the last five years and some I have become used to. I've even gotten somewhat inured to the fact that I write as a Briton (if never a great one) to a potential audience of millions. All that was put in to perspective yesterday - with the opening of the 30th Modern Olympiad in London. We, as host Nation, were never planning to upstage the sheer scale of the equivalent event at Beijing 2008, nor did we ever think that we might try to do so in budget, scale or pale imitation.
Britain just had to do it the only way it knows, which is what defines us - a wonderful mix of contradictory things that everyone but almost nobody - myself included - really properly understands and a certain penchant for comedy and self-deprecation.
It involved a lot of music, both old and new, but none of that from Deer Shed Festival 3 that I'm planning to mention now. It does however prompt me to mention that for every well known artist featured yesterday there are plenty more who aspire to gain our attention and are worthy of doing so. Aspiring athletes do not start at the Olympic Games, just as aspiring musicians do not headline Glastonbury, but they are there at the smaller festivals and local venues every week of every year. One thing that has made changes for them, and it was featured by the appearance of Sir Tim Berners-Lee at yesterday's event, is the internet. Without it I might not yet have even heard about these artists that I saw performing live at Deer Shed Festival 3: Think about what that really means.

As it always was, it only needs a little sunshine to get us in a party mood but a bar also helps too. Without the internet I would not be writing this and you, wherever you might be, would not be reading it. Yet, for all that, the reason that almost six-thousand of us were gathered there at all was for the entertainment - modern music,  live and strictly non-digital primarily, but also that most human of desires that is like-minded comradeship.

The sun first made an appearance on Friday evening when Belfast five-piece Cashier No. 9 were playing on the main stage.

I have seen this band live before, at Truck Festival 2011, and I was impressed then. I still am and they appear again at EOTR 2012, as part of the 15th anniversary of Bella Union Records on the Friday.

The very first act to play at Deer Shed Festival 3 was Leeds' Moody Gowns on the tented 'In The Dock Stage'. Not exactly the least abrasive of welcomes, perhaps...

...on the other hand a worthy welcome to the orthogonal world that is a good festival.

Not writing much but still listening...

OK. You are probably thinking that after three three-day festivals in six weeks I would, or perhaps should, be posting almost every day. Well. Let's just say it rarely works out quite like that.
It is not that I don't have plenty to write about; quite the opposite as I have heard so much live music that it takes a while for me to think about it all what it meant to me, and how it relates together or doesn't.  I've also been listening to more than a little new music too in the last two months - often just tracks posted as tasters on the internet etc. and while that might further complicate matters in terms of quantity it sometimes provides help in terms of inter-relation. A few of these things will have cropped up as un-linked items on the 'I've Just Listened To...' section on the side-bar, which I have recently moved to near the top as part of an ongoing rearrangement.
I hope to start to get my thoughts on the summer now gone and forthcoming releases trickling out soon but I shall be busy a couple of weekends.
  
Just a little later:
For the several people who have ended up here looking for 'music for Autumn' and/or 'music for Fall' (something I posted about at the start of summer last year) try this.

I love my house but were it to become detached from its terrace and dragged into the woods I think it might look much like this. I could live with that.
  
You can currently stream the whole album on Stereogum. It is released on vinyl and CD on October 17, 2011 by, as if I needed to say so, Bella Union.

What the Truck? In search of music as fun...

Never before have I attempted two 3-day festivals on successive weekends: Latitude followed by Truck Festival this weekend just gone.  When I added the latter in April it was because it just seemed an interesting thing to do and a way of seeing a wider range of live music. It did occur to me that, whilst almost certainly interesting, that might not be wholly in a positive way.
After two wet days at Latitude I was still wondering about the wisdom of it all. The contrast, not just in the weather, was such that once I had arrived on site in Oxfordshire I forgot clean about it because they were so different and that is the starting point here.
The following comments are not intended as a criticism of either event: Gone was the throng and corporate sponsorship gloss of Latitude and in came the homespun, almost folksy, intimacy of Truck Festival. It was very much a place to go to see and listen to music rather than a place to go to be seen to be listening to music.  It was certainly a whole lot of fun and one very much got the impression that the artists were enjoying themselves too. All kinds of music were on offer, from acoustic folk on the Wood Stage (and elsewhere) to technicolour noiseniks on the Last FM Stage and most things in between including more than a few lesser-known acts from middle England. As usual the problem is where to start.

Let's start with two bands that admitted that they had been burning the candle at both ends before appearing!

London based Tribes on the Last FM Stage on Sunday afternoon. They had been performing, and partying, at 'Secret Garden Party' the night before and apologized for being jaded. If this is what they can do in that state then the mind boggles. Despite the guitars and drums set-up and the powerful sound their songs are hook-laden.  Should you want to know how I think guitar-led pop should sound then it is pretty much like this.

Cashier No. 9 hails from Belfast. Here it is on the Clash Stage on Sunday lunch time.

Another good effort because this set was faultless despite the fact that they came on stage just twelve hours after they had come off the one at their previous gig in Londonderry.  It was summer music played out live on a perfect summer's day and the band has recently released its first album, the aptly titled 'To The Death Of Fun', on Bella Union Recordings.
  

This last comment leads me to another thought from the weekend - the resurgence of the record releasing 'label' as a guide to style and content. It was also a weekend that involved much discussing music and, in that sense, was much more reminiscent of End Of The Road than of Latitude.

New Music 2011 - Forthcoming album releases

I'll start with three - and all of them by artists appearing at EOTR 2011 - so the possibility of  hearing at leasts parts of them played live sooner rather than later is very real and all are also by artists that I have previously seen live at least once, which adds weight to my comment in the previous post.
  
Lanterns On The Lake - Gracious Tide, Take Me Home
This, the début album, is released by Bella Union Records on September 19, 2011.

The album track 'You're Almost There' is available as a free download.  The three self-released CD EPs are all sold out now but you can purchase them as downloads from the band's website. At least some of the songs will no doubt appear on the album in some form too. As well as Truck Festival and EOTR 2011 the band is playing  at Deershed 2011 [pre-booked tickets only - there are none available on the day this year] and, if you fancy a visit to the UK's highest pub and regular live music venue, LOTL is hosting a night with special guests at Tan Hill Inn on August 27 - £10 with camping included and no grumpy neighbours except sheep, one or two of which you might well find in the bar and likely in front of the fire (vying for prime space with the cats and dogs), and nothing else other than native wildlife and your fellow campers to disturb!
The band also played at EOTR 2010 - subject to a minor misfortune and ultimately a major victory.
  
Laura Marling - A Creature I Don't Know
September 12, 2011 is the release date for this, her third LP.

  
There is to be a limited version that will include 12" LP, CD and other goodies. You have been warned.  I can't wait to hear this live.  This is the track list:

• The Muse
• I Was Just A Card
• Don't Ask Me Why
• Salinas
• The Beast
• Night After Night
• My Friends
• Rest In The Bed
• Sophia
• All My Rage

Beth Jeans Houghton - [title as yet unknown to me]
An album some time in the making. Dodecahedron is promising and again another dab hand (and band) when it comes to live performance.
  
I'll add this one too, although it is an album already released, while I'm working in the genre of folk-influenced music. Much is written about regional folk music within the UK and Ireland but, in my recall at least, little of it specifically concerns that of Devon. I came across this and have now ordered it unheard, which is something that I like doing as you may well know.

The artists involved suggest goodness. Jim Causley is prime mover here but it also includes others unlikely to risk their well earned reputations on a dubious project. It was released by Wild Goose Records in March of this year.

New Music 2011 - Part 4 - Smart Flesh - The Low Anthem

Well I knew it was well in hand by the time I returned from EOTR 2010 almost exactly two months ago.  It seems such a long time but now what I said then is finally to become reality.

Recorded in disused industrial premises in Providence, RI it is to be entitled Smart Flesh. The current release date on Nonesuch/Bella Union (in the UK) is February 21, 2011 and I for one can't wait. They played some of the putative tracks from it live at EOTR 2010 and, oh my God Charlie Darwin, they were so good once again!


Other recent and relevant posts:
The Pirates of Providence...Low Anthem @ EOTR 2010
While I'm on this general subject their cover of 'Ghost Woman Blues' (George Carter, 1929) is something of an ear-opener.

Further posts on New Music 2011:
Part 1  ---  Esben and The Witch
Part 2  ---  Yuck

Part 3  ---  Duke Spirit
Part 5  ---  Go!Team
Part 6  ---  Rhosyn
Part 7  ---  Emily Barker and The Red Clay Halo
Part 8  ---  Those Dancing Days
Part 9  ---  Some things I am looking forward to.
Part 10  ---  More things I am looking forward to.
Part 11  ---  New Heads On Old Shoulders?
Part 12  ---  Snowglobe - Jesca Hoop
Part 13  ---  Queen of the Minor Key