An infernal, harrowing scrape begins Rowan and Anna Rheingans’ first album in four years: a bow gnashed against a tambourin à cordes (a traditional Pyrenean strung drum) joined by a distorted and octave-pedalled viola, creating a frightening undertow. The song is Devils, inspired by singer Frankie Armstrong’s 1978 version of the folk ballad The Devil and the Farmer’s Wife, in which she celebrates a woman taken to hell who fights back. The sisters’ voices sound golden against the frantic clamour: “The women are much better than men / Can go to hell and come back again.”
Five albums into a garlanded career, the Sheffield sisters’ work is getting more radical by the release. Inspired by the physicality, energy and intimacy of performing live, Start Close In is produced by contemporary composer and progressive metal artist Adam Pietrykowski, who helps shape its spacious but strangely fertile soundworlds. Its instruments and influences coil from across Europe, from Livet Behöver Inga Droger (Life Needs No Drugs), summoning up memories of a Swedish folk festival that mixes feasting and night-swimming, to the propulsive Si Sabiatz Drolletas, an Occitan-sung bourrée (a French dance) that tells women not to get married as they’ll regret it.
Moments of softer beauty come even when their subjects are heavy: in the marriage of guitar and voice on Over and Over Again, about a need to find medicine to cope with witnessing war and genocide unfold; in Daniel Thorne’s saxophone beautifully bursting into Un Voltigeur, a song about tending a garden sung by polyphonic groups in the Pyrenees that’s actually about finding love and trust. Taking its title from a David Whyte poem about engaging fully with the present and the immediate, this album twitches and gambols with life, very fittingly, from start to finish.
Also out this month
Mali Obomsawin and Jake Blount harness the cosmic ambition of Afrofuturism to create new universes for folk in their collaborative album about climate change, Symbiont (Smithsonian Folkways). Shape note hymns, spirituals and Caribbean banjo tunes are “remixed” – a word the pair use deliberately, to eschew folk nostalgia – with My Way’s Cloudy and Come Down Ancients being powerful, pulsing examples of the old tangling brilliantly with the new. The first album by Angeline Morrison since my 2022 album of the year The Sorrow Songs: Folk Songs of Black British Experience, Ophelia (self-released) shows her astonishing range and broad ideas. Flashes of jazz, lush zithers and her deep, resonant voice mark her as an artist to support and savour. David Grubb’s Circadia (Cambrian) is also a delightful curio: a sweet, oddly perky traditional instrument-stacked album about the stages of passing from wakefulness to sleep.