Cover Lay Down

We’ve spent the weekend cleaning house, both figuratively and literally, and we’re proud of the results: a new WordPress install behind the scenes here at Cover Lay Down to fix some pesky spam issues (sorry, folks!) and a living room almost ready for a tree, already peppered with various figurines and ornaments of holiday cheer and temporarily festooned with drying dress shifts freshly washed in anticipation of the various holiday concerts and office parties to come. 

Now the fire burns bright under the half-eaten advent calendar, and as they have since morning, the soft, celebratory sounds of the holidays fill the air, piped through a growing sense of wonder and delight that Christmas – Christmas! – is upon us again.  Join us as we bring on the Holidays with our very own all-streaming seasonal sampler: this year’s first-out-of-the-gate folk EP and Album length releases, featuring favorites from the Elder Christmas Canon, gleaned from all our favorite sources, and simply shimmering with joy.

We kick off today’s focus on the traditional stuff (as opposed to the pop standards of Christmas, which will surely follow posthaste as the season progresses) with one of my favorite old hymns, done up weird and wonderful as one of four indiefolk delights on Jesse Blake Rundle’s charming EP It’s Light Now. Wait ’til the drum, vibraphone, and marimba kick in: goddamn and rat-a-tat, it blooms alright.

You gotta love a Christmas album that includes, among its “album of modern Christmas classics”, covers of non-holiday Smiths standard Please Please Please and a droning, gauzy zither-and-uke take on Yaz classic Only You, neither of which have previously been associated with Chrimbo at all. But Cambridge, UK duo Hitman Hooker (and friends) make it work, with modern standards and carols alongside, on A Christmas Gift For You, a grungy, lo-fi antifolk album that shimmers with the sheer, ragged glee of the season.  A raw, rare gift, indeed.

Slippery and thick and chilling as ice, with horns like a brass quartet doped up for the holidays: Lana Winterhalt’s take on traditional carol The Holly and The Ivy is a gorgeous track, with staircase vocals and an eternity in just 3 minutes.  The frozen futuristic tone her shimmery electronica accompaniment brings to Ave Maria make for a powerhouse second act, too.  The originals on Diamonds, a holiday-themed full-length, are equally stunning.

Those looking for something a little more relaxed and traditional need look no further than Noel, a gentle, gleeful, touchingly amateur three-fer from Mackenzie Profitt of King’s Lynn, UK. The name appears to be a duo, or so say the male-and-female harmonies; thanks to a Bandcamp page otherwise bereft of information, we’ll have to let the songs speak for themselves elsewise.

Fragile and decidedly moody – in a good, majestically indiefolk mode, of course – comes the first track of Home For the Holidays: A Christmas Collection, a collection unassuming on the surface yet rich in the friendship and collaboration its first-named artists imply. And this one moves along, folks: kudos, especially, to “Noah, Mitch, & Kate” for a dreamy, uke-driven sunshine of a track in Silent Night, and others both old and popular done in surprisingly diverse and playful style.

Mosquito Fleet describes their sound as etherial soundscapes, and they’re not wrong; compare their ambient take on I Heard The Bells with the Anais Mitchell track we featured last week for an interesting study: both build slow to a triumphant note appropriate to the poem’s sentiment, but this one pulls back and forth more, creating an interesting tension and no small amount of mystery as its rich instrumental and vocal layers come together to reach towards the angels.  Click through, too, for an Auld Lang Syne b-side – a popular track this year, but in this case, making for a pairing that reaches into the world of poetics stunningly.  

12th Night masquerades as a slow form of punk folk; its underbelly is scummy Texan alt-rock with retro guitar licks and an urgency that can’t be beat, recorded on 45 but played on 33. Thanks to a penchant for dreampop arrangement, it’s nowhere near too heavy to include in a list for the folkfan, neither.  Everyone’s covering O Come Emmanuel this year, and this band’s covered it twice, both electric and acoustic…so although we’ve started with the second-gentlest track among their full set of tradcarols (one which turns surprisingly discordant, in canon, in the end), click back to the start of the collection for the good old grit and grunge that is modern indieroots music at its very best…

Finally, and in a different medium, thanks to artist preference of release format: Celtic-American Roots band RUNA first found themselves on these pages in 2014, when Current Affairs, the supergroup’s third full-length, won top honors in our year’s end traditional album category.  Here, in a first release from a brand new Winter Song EP, the quintet closes out our midseasonal set with a cheery take on a familiar upbeat friend.

Always ad-free and artist-centric, Cover Lay Down has been exploring the ethnographic intersection of folk and coversong since 2007 thanks to the support of artists, labels, promoters, and readers like YOU. So do your part: listen, love, like, and above all, follow links to purchase the music, the better to keep it alive.