Folk
Noah’s Barks pages relating to the folk music genre.
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The Beatles – “The Beatles”
Everything The Beatles were is encapsulated in this double album. From R&B rock, to folk, to psychedelia and beyond. This is ‘The Beatles.’ (read more)
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Comus Retrospective
(Original publication date unknown) There are few artists as expressive as telling a story as Comus. I wrote a bit about it in my review for First Utterance, particularly for their song “Diana,” but it’s true for their entire library (small as it is). Roger Wootton gets incredibly into the macabre stories he tells, yelping… (read more)
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Comus – “East of Sweden: Live at the Melloboat Festival 2008”
Er, how to critique this? The performances just sound so… impassioned. The opposite of what Comus should be. They are almost the exact same as their studio counterparts, just in worse quality. “Diana” is just too abrasive here and not very listenable. There’s a little bit of improvising in the middle of the songs but… (read more)
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Comus – “First Utterance”
An all-time favorite album, ‘First Utterance’ is shocking, anachronistic folk rock that caused a career shift and death of its band, Comus. (read more)
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Comus – “Song to Comus: The Complete Collection”
First Utterance is an essential album, and the remastering of it on Song to Comus: The Complete Collection is very tasteful and enough for me to consider it an improvement over the original (apparently the first CD issues of First Utterance had terrible sound quality, so there’s another reason to get this set). There are… (read more)
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Grizzly Bear – “Shields”
No Grizzly Bear album is well-rounded, but Shields comes closest. For the first time, its sonic peaks are worth traversing an album for, especially since they’re tactfully spread out. (read more)
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Tim Buckley – “Blue Afternoon”
‘Blue Afternoon’ returns Tim Buckley to a more conventional, modest-length song format, a departure from the ethereal album cohesion shown prior. (read more)
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David Bowie – “David Bowie” (1969)
There are some serious hints of brilliance on 1969‘s David Bowie in its beautiful psychedelic/folk songs “Space Oddity” and “Letter to Hermione.” “Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud” and “Memory of a Free Festival” also deserve some mention. Most tracks on here have interesting segments to them, like the beginning of “Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed.”… (read more)
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Neutral Milk Hotel – “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” (1998)
This is a good album, though I can’t help but feel disappointed while listening to it. Everyone seems to agree that the most interesting aspect of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is its odd choices of instrumentation that are played in an intriguing off-kilter way to give the album a sort of hazy, psychedelic… (read more)