Tuesday, 13 June 2017

Kronos Quartet - Folk Songs


Rating: 5/5

Review:
An outstanding disc



This is terrific.  I thought it would be good, but this collaboration with Sam Amidon, Olivia Chaney, Natalie Merchant and Rhiannon Giddens is even better than I expected.

The Kronos Quartet are a superb ensemble who, for well over 40 years, have made magnificent recordings of their own and have collaborated with the likes of Bowie, McCartney, Björk, Nelly Furtado and many others.  Here they have recorded an album of folk songs with four outstanding singers.  The choice of material is excellent, some haunting traditional melodies alongside social comment in songs like Factory Girl.  It's uniformly excellent (although personally, I find the closing Lullaby a little ordinary by comparison).

The arrangements are fantastic, with the quartet giving real life to the songs and sounding in some places like a hurdy-gurdy, in others like a rootsy Appalachian folk ensemble and so on.  The singing is quite brilliant, as you'd expect from these four outstanding singers, and the whole thing is a pleasure from start to finish.

In short, I think this is an outstanding disc which I can recommend very warmly indeed.

No comments:

Post a Comment