“This album comes from a six-year long space of change,” Leif explains, “from a life I was living as someone afraid of my own brain and body, into someone a lot more openly unshiney. Painful and seeping. I think that distance and decisions and loss and conflict are all things that can birth you into a different kind of being.” This is achieved with contributions from Clea Anaïs, Bill Wells, Matt Swann, Clarissa Cheong and Bart Owl (of eagleowl) and Faith Eliott and Mark Hamilton (of Woodpigeon), leading to a sound that’s minimalist but rich in its quiet detail.

Latest single ‘Pass Back Through’ captures the album’s tone. A song written in the aftermath of loss, confronting the non-linear phenomenon of grief and its penchant for dragging old wounds back from the past. A time in which it is all too easy to get baffled by the repetition of your interior landscape, lost in circling thoughts. But with ‘Pass Back Through’, L.T. Leif seeks a way out through the clarity of cold air and wide open spaces. Looking to the northerly landscape as a kind of catharsis.

“There’s a smallness I would feel when walking in the cold Finnish nights that brought a kind of clearness or release,” they explain. “There’s this feeling I sometimes got when a bird would fly low over my head from behind, like they were somehow a thought of mine that was bursting forth and flying off, fading out there into the distance… I can get really mired in my own thoughts, and there’s like a release, or a lift that comes when you can let the rich pain and pleasure of the world just be.”

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The breezy ‘Celebration’ and earthy ‘On My Grind’ open the release, Audet blending vocals and field recording to great effect, before ‘Open Sesame’ really points to the scope of things with its urgent, mystical vibe. Similarly devotional instrumentals like ‘Exercise A’ and ‘Heat of the Afternoon’ offer landscapes which the other tracks populate, so when gentle, swelling folk songs like ‘Staying in Line’ arrive it feels like a convergence from four corners, the consequence of great distance travelled and firm belief in peace and joy. “Good will come to you,” he sings in the latter, echoing the title. “Good will come to me. Good will come to us.”

Indeed, much of the album is infused with this sense of positivity and goodwill, a sense of spirituality which binds the tracks despite their diversity. Many of the songs are short, succinct snatches and textures, and all are grounded with a certain intimacy, the spirituality not some vast cosmological fear but instead a human communion, joyous meetings of small groups of people thankful to be alive. From the tropical jam of ‘Take Me Higher’ and finger-clicking swells of ‘The Real Way’ to the sensual ‘A Level Playing Field’ and bluesy and soulful ‘Rain Cannot Change’, Good Will Come To Us is brimming with a confidence in the world, its inhabitants and their ability to transcend ‘normal’ existence in favour of something altogether more wonderful.

Good Will Come To You is actually the second part of a trilogy the label describes as “genre-spanning”, each of the three records exploring a different aspect of Audet’s musical talents. The first part, Water the Next Day, was released in April and sees an Un Blonde that use synths and electronic drums in place of the acoustic. Blending jazz with R&B and soul, here the songs are spheres and down-tempo and drowned in space. Audet is either lifting the avant garde into listenable territory or pushing popular R&B into exciting new place. 

You can buy  Water the Next Day and Good Will Come To You now via the Egg Paper Factory Bandcamp page or the Un Blonde Bandcamp page.

Photo by Derek Haussecker

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“In the Dark on 99 is in many ways the realist representation of winter, the real-life counterpart to the romantic crunch of snow and hot cocoa. That said, it deals with this in a much more interesting way than merely saying ‘actually, winter is cold and dark and the snow turns to muddy slush…’ The album probes what winter means, what it does to us, how it becomes less a season than some existential force.”

The Black Pits, Cuming’s latest EP, looks to build on the album and explore themes of travel and isolation in a land where the elements hold a significant curiosity. Again, his lyrics are cryptic and poetic and delivered in that Bill Callahan sort of style which made In The Dark… so evocative, drawing the listener through the tracks like the faceless narrator of a dream. Opener ‘Keep Trying’ is the perfect example, the strange vocals backed by an incisive and vaguely menacing instrumentation reminiscent of Old Earth:

The wind will turn/ Against your back/ Your back will talk/ To/ the window’s crack/ As time cloves two/ On a strong boat on the moor/ You’ve heard this before/ It’s sparser than ever/ So keep on trying/ Keep trying

Each track enlists a different producer, with fellow musicians like Garrett Johnson, Layne L’Heureux and Tyler Butler taking over the duties, so it is Cuming’s distinctive vocals which provide the cohesion across the six songs. ‘Long Life’ slows slightly, the track brooding and rhetorical (“What do you know?/ Are you strong?/ Do you travel?/ Does the wind even make you cold?”), while ‘Lost in Time’ relaxes further, the vocals becoming smooth and fluid, like some quasi-doo-wop act in a smoke-filled club too late at night. The lyrics become odder on the restrained ‘Quiet Dream’, fragmented but compelling, grasping at a logic just out of sight.

“I’ve heard a hundred sorry midnight’s score/ That electric hum, the loner’s lullaby/ To kiss another gunshy infant morn/ To drink another bloodshot evening dry”

In comparison, ‘Stay Inside’ is heavy, a track smothered by mean reverb that is ominous both in terms of sound and lyrics. “When you wake up in the morning,” Cuming sings, “don’t open up your eyes. As you’re walking out the door, stay inside”. However, the title track closes the release on a more upbeat note, with the hostile drone replaced by brighter, shimmering guitars.

Heaven/ I would remember/ A fleeting sheet in time/ A symbol of a sign/ At home/ And darkness breeds alone/ It trembles with desire/ But in the blackest pit, there was a shovel for me/ Hold tight

The Black Pits EP is out now on Bart Records, and you can buy it from the Jom Comyn Bandcamp page.

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Robbie Bankes is a Calgary folk musician whose talents span an impressive array of instruments from around the globe. According to this feature by The Calgary Collective, he plays in groups that make a diversity of folk music, from traditional Quebecois to age-old Celtic stuff. But on this solo album, Through February Snow, which he released earlier this year, Bankes focuses on what sounds to me like american folk music, playing guitar, 5-string banjo and fiddle to make what he himself describes as, “sings songs of the dusty prairie and high mountain peaks.”

The entire album is peppered with great lyrics, which is as important to folk music as guitars are to rock. Opening track ‘Alice’ is a beautifully written and poetic (lost) love song, which utilizes the classic minimal folk formula – just one man and his guitar. It opens with the lines:

“Oh my Alice I’ve been dreaming ’bout your sea-blue eyes
All the letters that I’ve sent that have not met with replies
Maybe you got lucky or you just can’t find the time.
Oh my Alice I’ve been dreaming about our lives”.

The second song is ‘February Snow’ which sounds warm and cosy during the persisting winter chill. The songwriting is great again, see for example the refrain:

“There is a place that’Il like to go
To watch the city far below
And to hear the sounds and to see the show
And to wait for you and the February snow
Well you took off your shoes and showed me your soul
You gave me a lot of warm socks to keep out the cold”

‘Little Sadie’ is a change of direction, a throwback to old-timey Gothic folk, with a morbid atmosphere straight out of a Flannery O’Connor story. It tells the tale of a murder subsequent events from the perspective of the perpetrator:

“I went out last night to make a little round
I met little Sadie I blowed her down
Went back home and jumped into bed
.44 pistol under my head.”

Bankes shows his proficiency for writing sad and pretty folk songs again on ‘As I Walked Out’ (e.g. “I’ll pack my bags and I’m moving on to soft summer nights of silver and gold, long rides and hillsides and shivering cold.“), before providing a decidedly Canadian take on the classic folk song ‘Hang Me Oh Hang Me’ (“Up on the Rocky Mountains it’s there I’ll make my stand, with a rifle on my shoulder and a sixshooter in my hand”). ‘Up to Skoki’ is a banjo/fiddle instrumental, the soundtrack to a lively Appalachian celebration, and ‘The Blackest Crow’ sees things out with a wistful flourish, the musical equivalent of an evening with no company except the lonely pines and two foot of snow.

Music can be used to say a lot of different things but folk musicians are poets at heart and (to meat least) are best suited writing these kinds of songs. Lonely and lovelorn they may be, but they’re also songs of hope, of finding beauty in everyday life and the natural world, and a realization that our lives are not isolated events put the products of hundreds of years of history. Folk music paints a romanticized version of a life that is actually attainable. It doesn’t shy from sadness and hurt, in fact it can dwell on them, but it dwells on other things too, like how the town looks from the hillside or the sound of the river.

You can get Through February Snow via the Robbie Bankes Bandcamp page.

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Paddy Neill – Widow’s Town

The debut EP from New Zealand’s Paddy Neill, Widow’s Town is a four-song blend of heartfelt folk and toe-tapping country, more suited to the Great Plains than the middle of the Pacific. You can download the EP via Neill’s Bandcamp page.

She Keeps Bees – Eight Houses

Jessica Larrabee and Andy LaPlant are back with a new She Keeps Bees album, Eight Houses. It may push the folky limits of Feet on the Ground, but the ten tracks of slow, sad music warrant inclusion. Our friend over at Slowcoustic described it as ‘gritty and fragile’ which, although rather paradoxical, is maybe the perfect way to capture the mood of this album. A glass hammer, a steel spider web, Eight Houses is no one thing, and to limit itself to fragile, or gritty or happy or sad, would be limit its ability to depict believable stories and emotions. The narrator is vulnerable, but knows everyone else is too. Eight Houses is out on Future Gods (US) and BB Island (EU) on the 16^th September.

Noah Young – Colorado

Noah Young is a folk artist from Boston. There isn’t all that much information about him on his Bandcamp, so I’ll spare you the details. What I do know is that he has recently released an EP called Colorado and I really like it. Fans of Bright Eyes or Blind Pilot will love this. Listen to the title track in the player. He also has three other releases from the past few years which are well worth checking out.

Kris Ellestad – ‘Surrender’

Next we have a brand new track from Calgary’s Kris Ellestad. ‘Surrender’ is really lovely, a sort of dreamy, ethereal folk song, backed up with Ellestad’s trademark croon. You can download the track for however much you like on the Kris Ellestad Bandcamp page. Also, in case you missed it, Ellestad released a wonderful album of covers earlier this year. Get it for nothing here.

Field Medic – P E G A S U S T H O T Z

Last but not least we have Field Medic, aka Kevin Patrick from San Francisco. He released his latest EP P E G A S U S T H O T Z back in June and it’s really good. My current favourite track is the imaginatively titled ‘i swallowed five silver dollars and was a prince painting flowers for an evening’, which sounds a little bit like Frontier Ruckus and has some pretty despondent lyrics which detail (another) break-up. Listen below and then head over to Bandcamp to buy the EP as a digital download or on cassette.

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I think it’s fair to say they have gone up in the world since our humble post (although probably not as a consequence of said post, as hard as that may be to believe) and their ambitions to breach the indie/mainstream divide comes through in the music, mixing folk and rock to produce hearfelt, emotive tracks that would be at home next to other popular folky acts, you know, Mumford & Sons, Ben Howard, late-Frightened Rabbit, that sort of thing.

The single ‘Rolling Stone’ will be released in the UK on 24th March.

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The songs have that mix of casual and and growly vocals that bring to mind scenes of parading egos in enclosed and sweaty spaces. The opening track ‘When I Found You’ is the connection between Mike Tod’s solo stuff and the garage band sound before the tempo gradually increases across the release. ‘Break a Ghost Part 2’ is a slow sneering challenge, the prelude to the bar brawl in ‘Part 3’, the same song as Part 2 but sped up to have a swaggering sloppiness, a frantic but loose urgency that doesn’t adhere to any sort of sense outside of whiskey and hot smoky rooms.

We have written about Mike Tod a few times (here and here) and he featured on HI54LOFI’s side of our Canada Day mixtape. If you are as big a fan of him as we are, I’m sure you will enjoy No. 0.

Grab it over at The Flying Blackbyrds Bandcamp page for a price of your choice.

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Also, if you’re lucky enough to be in Alberta this weekend, you have three chances to see Paul play live; one in Edmonton tonight (Friday 22nd Feb) courtesy of Cabin Songs, with Matthew A. Wilkinson, Jom Comyn and The Royal Iguana Fur (who cover Louie Louie here), then twice in Calgary on Saturday and Sunday (23rd and 24th of Feb). Check   Facebook for more info.

P.S. The slightly bizarre cover art was taken by Warren Humeny, check out a blog of his photography here.

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The songs were recorded live on tape on a single afternoon (with Scott Munro, from Chad vanGaalen’s band), and it suits the style perfectly. There’s something about a folk song that deserves to be captured in one go, some personality unique to each telling that can be lessened or eradicated with over-production. There’s an interview with Damien Jurado (from the fantastic Room 125 Productions) where he says that he feels that songs always exist and musicians just wait for them to appear; a near spontaneous discovery of a particular song occurs before he writes it down and records it. There is no critical dissection or agonizing over details, just a set of sounds and words that are allowed to live and breathe in their original form. I don’t mean this to sound as if songwriters stumble upon songs, or as if I’m taking anything from the writing, but there is something within songs (something that may well go deeper than the words) than develops and blooms during the performance. Sure, it may work for some people to write a song then continually change parts of it, maybe recording the deconstructed components separately before building it all up again, but I don’t think it suits the true folk music that Mike Tod is creating. He (at least to my ears) discovers songs as their complete entity and shares them as that, with no tricks. This is basically a long-winded way of saying that there is something admirably true and alive about the songs on this record – as if they were innate objects within Tod and people he met and Californian wilderness itself which he harnessed for us to hear too.

Garden song (inch by inch) by Mike Tod

I guess I should describe the music a bit more to give you idea of what it is like. Anyone who is familiar with his previous releases (such as the excellent ’The Northern Country’ album) will find The California Recordings a lot more restrained and melancholic. The catchy foot-stomping whistle-inducing pace has been replaced with contemplative strumming and a noticeable reduction in tempo. There is great variety in the songs and characters on offer; from the old time tale of ‘The Ballad of the Miner’ and the nostalgia of ‘The Lass and The Lad’, to the hopeful ‘Garden Song’ and the sentimental mixture of love and regret of ‘You’ll Have To Excuse Me’. Across the album you get the feeling that the songs have been collected rather than written, tales foraged from the woods and their inhabitants and recorded with a keen ear and expert hand and large heart. The collection of songs feels organic and real.

You’ll Have To Excuse Me from Dylan Rhys Howard.

The album is available to pre-order now on Bandcamp and will be released by Cabin Songs on 26th January with a show at the Lantern Community Church with Tyler Butler, The Bitterweed Draw and Robbie Banks. More details can be found on the Facebook event page. Mike is touring Western Canada in Jan/Feb (dates here) and I have heard whispers that he plans to tour further afield in the coming year so keep an eye out for him near you.

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Their album, Stay Cold, is a frantic 25 minutes of abstract politcal statements dealing with Canada and Canadian nationalism (or rather pride, there’s no sinister right-wing agenda here). Lead singer Kevin Stebner, while clearly displaying a love of Canada (just look at the artwork), avoids the traditional love letter style eulogising to the great country and adopts a more realistic approach. In his nation things aren’t perfect but they certainly aren’t hopeless either. It’s a refreshingly balanced, pragmatic and overall hopeful record.

Wave More Flags by Stalwart Sons

Buy Stay Cold on Bandcamp. I also recommend having a read through the lyrics on Bandcamp on your first few listens, it can be hard to follow his gruff voice at first.

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