Reviews
We Will Never Die
This is Tuva’s one and only Albert Kuvezin’s first Yat-Kha studio album since 2010’s excellent Poets and Lighthouses. Right from...
Reviewed by Michael Ormiston in issue: July/2021
Stambeli: The Legacy of the Black Tunisians
The heavy clacking of the qaraqab (iron castanets) and the hypnotising melodies of the gimbri (three-stringed lute) make it easy...
Reviewed by Alexandra Petropoulos in issue: July/2011
Uptown Top Ranking
VP Records here present a comprehensive guide to Byron Lee, a bandleader and producer whose appeal grew from the tastes...
Reviewed by Clyde Macfarlane in issue: October/2015
Round Top Wagon
Thomas McCarthy was brought up on the Travellers’ site in Ladbroke Grove, although he spent a lot of time in...
Reviewed by Tim Cumming in issue: June/2011
Zanzibara 7: Sikinde vs Ndekule
This fine addition to the confusingly titled Zanzibara series focuses on two of the leading bands from the astonishingly fertile...
Reviewed by Jon Lusk in issue: Nov/Dec/2013
A Delicate Game
Comprising singer Claire Hastings, pianist Tina Jordan Rees, fiddler Gráinne Brady and Heather Downie on clarsach (harp), Top Floor Taivers’...
Reviewed by Billy Rough in issue: May/2017
Tovi
A ‘tovi’, Finnish accordionist Teija Niku helpfully explains, is “an undefined bit of time, somewhere between a moment and a...
Reviewed by Julian May in issue: May/2026
Cuttin' Grass Vol 2: The Cowboy Arms Sessions
Sturgill Simpson's Cuttin' Grass Vol 2 features the same combination of insightful, often satirically humorous and self-deprecating, songwriting and brilliant...
Reviewed by Doug Deloach in issue: June/2021
Everybody Wants to Know How I Die
The fifth album of demon-haunted country blues from Canada’s scariest songwriter. Sinner takes traditional songs as his jumping-off point, expanding...
Reviewed by Paul Slade in issue: April/2026
Hed
The seventh-born of the well-known Kreiz Breizh Akademi musical laboratory from Brittany, this collective is based on the famous tradition...
Reviewed by Anne Ge in issue: March/2020
