A Very Merry Coverfolk, Vol. 3 (2019): Welcome Yule
with Allysen Callery, Ryan McMullan, Winter Union, The Petersens & more!
A smorgasbord today, as Solstice passes and our official Christmas celebration of a year’s worth of holiday coverage comes to a close. Find tender and mild, and hearty joy alongside: at tree, hearth, and table, the lights and the streets filled with twinkling snow.
We’ll be back between Christmas and New Years, as always, with our annual round up of The Year’s Best Coverfolk albums, tributes, series, and singles. Until then, may you, too, feel the singing of the season, and be served by it. And may all your Christmases be bright with sound and solace, and the aching feeling of hope in the chest as the season rises to greet you well.
Recorded in a church in Leeds, Christmas in Hevelwood starts off fingerpicked and discordant with a mournful and tense In The Bleak Midwinter, and never lets up: a pulsing loop-like Angels We Have Heard On High, a loose, singer-songwriter’s talksong O Come O Come Emmanuel, and a singular Joy To The World later, and we’re convinced: there is more in depth and breadth to be found in the carols of old, and when unearthed, its utter beauty kills. Hevelwood is (his Bandcamp bio tells us) the solo project of acoustic tale-spinner Tim Woodson of Yorkshire, but other than that, this EP and its artist stand alone and untethered, singletons shrouded in mystery. How appropriate.
Alternative NYC-based sibling group BAILEN is hard to categorize: their two-fer Holiday release sports both a funky classic rock take on Christmas Is All Around and a touching I’ll Be Home for Christmas patterned after the version in Love, Actually, but with added harmonies and a hint of homespun whimsy. It’s hard to tell which is the b-side, too – and we love that. Look for the brand new band again in a week or so, too, when more of their 2019 coverage, including their cover of The Sugarcubes’ Hit, hits our end of year list – a stunning reinvention, and decidedly folk, in a Fleet Foxes meets Crosby Stills and Nash mind meld. Or is it Fleetwood Mac meets First Aid Kit? Regardless: good stuff, all around.
Acoustic surf rock and the dusty soundtrack of the spaghetti folk western meet in Lonely Exile Here, a first seasonal foursome from drawling Arizona duo Bones In The Walls – who don’t have to say, but do anyway, that their sound comes straight out of the mountains and deserts of the American west.
It’s a little contrived, and a little repetitive. But there’s something so darling and delightful about this slide-and-gravel-driven single from Scottish country-punk-slash-alt-bluesman Dave Arcari, we just can’t resist including it. Palate-cleansing, at least – and worth it.
Traditional folk fans rejoice: the gentle, rich mix of voices that comprise A Winter Union rings loud with the joy of the English Christmas canon, thanks to a supergroup including Hannah Sanders and Ben Savage, whose duo work we’ve featured on these pages before, both at Christmas and in our 2017 year’s end roundup. Formed for a beautiful Christmas charity release in 2017, and reunited for a live show last year, the five-piece band toured around the UK this season and released this album “due to popular demand” after their last just this week. Last year’s concert becomes this year’s Live In Concert album? Yes, please. Come for the classics, but stay until the end, for a strong encore take on The Band.
I would I could remember how I found Jacquie Lawson‘s White Christmas, but it doesn’t matter, really: what matters is that we found it, and just in time. Simple, careful, sweet and oh so sad, the track simply shimmers, a dream in white.
Ghost-folk songstress Allysen Callery returns to Cover Lay Down with this year’s Covers of Christmas, a home-recorded, mixed-bag set released a day at a time in the final days leading up to Christmas itself. Many of the choices here are simple gifts, learned quickly and sourced broad – see, for example, her delicate, hollow take on Neil Young’s Birds – but several are true-blue Christmas songs, including soft and slippery deconstructions of holiday songs from Elvis, John Denver, In The Bleak Midwinter and Greensleeves. Act now to hear it: like her music, these annual advent sets are as fleeting and fragile as they are hauntingly beautiful, and are as likely as not to disappear before the passing of the year.
We’ve been listening to family bluegrass band The Petersens a lot this year, both because we’re suckers for close girl-group harmonies and true-blue Appalachian gospel arrangements, and because their covers swing and stomp, sticking in the ears and brain. Their choices of coverage belie their genre roots, too: Glen Campbell, Dolly Parton, and more, making for a smashing year with a great promise of more to come.
Your favorite holiday Pogues song is generally covered as it comes: raucous, ragged, drunk and delightful. But stripped of all urgency and anger, Fairytale of New York turns out tender, like a slowly setting sun, or the waning of the year into naught. Don’t take our word for it. Twenty-something Irish pop darling Ryan McMullan proves it in the softest, most gentle version of the song we’ve heard, an incredible turn with guitar low and droning like a banjo, and every word and note poignant and hollow, echoing in the Belfast church where it was recorded softly, leaving us fans for life.
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