45s and LPs spanning the period 1964-1973, including his long-lost album debut. The original material here trumps the folk chestnuts. Alasdair Roberts does Lord Randall a lot better, has to be said.

A kind of greatest hits of the one-man-band, albeit all rare now, or previously unreleased.
An early version of Abner’s signature song I’m So Depressed, on LP for the first time, is followed by four unreleased recordings, on electric banjo, drums played by his feet, and harmonica.
The second side features Abner’s charged, mournful last recordings, not for the faint of heart, made two months before his death. These were released by Mississippi as a ten-inch EP back in 2011, entitled Last Ole Minstrel Man.

‘A moody, atmospheric delight. Jim’s roots in composition via tape-editing have evolved into a highly musical assembly of found-and-processed sounds that achieve near-orchestral majesty as they hang in the very air of the drama that unfolds in Kyle Armstrong’s Hands That Bind.
‘Described as a ‘slow-burn prairie gothic drama’, set in the farmland of Canada’s Alberta province, and starring Will Oldham and Bruce Dern, Hands That Bind is a spellbinding trip to the existential bone of rural working life in North America. As conflict rises over hard worked patches of land to provide a mere and mean existence, a desperate air settles in, as a series of mysterious, often supernatural occurrences rock the small community.
‘O’Rourke’s vaporous, serpentine musical backdrops and atmospheres reflect the obsessions and distractions of the film’s principles; moods of all sorts seen or otherwise implied. Additionally, the music highlights cinematographer Michael Robert McLaughlin’s closely observed accounting of the farmers’ environment, as well as the striking widescreen images of the big sky country with unnerving flair.’

Like Saturday night on a Sunday morning. Patsy on Jesus. Elvis-no-pelvis. With four celebrated Nashville sidemen fresh from June 1958 Presley sessions.

Newly remastered (by way of last year’s Reprise Albums box set).

Her third, 1970 album, the brilliant summation of her folky start — with favourites like Woodstock, Big Yellow Taxi and The Circle Game.
The LP is newly remastered by Bernie Grundman under the supervision of Joni Mitchell.

The beloved 1974 hit with Help Me, Free Man In Paris and co.
Folk-rock with jazzy flavours — Joe Sample and Wilton Felder alongside Graham Nash and David Crosby…
The LP is newly remastered by Bernie Grundman under the supervision of Joni Mitchell.

Newly remastered by Bernie Grundman under the supervision of Joni Mitchell.

The Celtic harpist leading a dozen friends — guitar, piano, violins, flutes, zarb, zither — in spell-binding departures from Breton folk-song, originally released in 1976 but fresh and strange as a vermillion hydrangea in full bloom.

Noguès was to collaborate with Rabih Abou-Khalil, amongst others, but ‘we are reminded here of the Meredith Monk of Greensleeves, there the early albums of Brigitte Fontaine / Areski, elsewhere Emmanuelle Parrenin, Pascal Comelade… Noguès’ poetry is ever-changing: airy (Hunvre), cosmopolitan (Pinvidik Eo Va C’hemener), enigmatic (Ar Bugel Koar), profound (Ar Gemenerez), enchanting (Hirness An Devezhiou). And then there is Marc’h Gouez itself, between nursery rhyme and chamber music, weaving a fabulous, transfixing web. “Brittany equals poetry,” said André… Breton; and Kristen Noguès proves it to be true.’

Lovely stuff; dream-like, captivating; quite different. Check it out.

Terrific new folk music from Dublin. Try the opener, the travellers’ song What Will We Do When We Have No Money? And the centre-piece, the furiously inward-turned immigrant song, Déanta in Éireann. The Granite Gaze… killer.
Hotly recommended.

‘The bad influences’, from Bogota, with their third album for us: twenty-eight gorgeous variations of saudade, in a warmly acoustic, post-punk take on Tropicalismo — impromptu, snapshot and sublime.