April Playlist: Shut Your Dirty Mouth

Another month has come to an end, and that means it's time for another month-end playlist. Here are 10 tracks that I thoroughly enjoyed listening to in April:

1. By the Throat - Laurence Made Me Cry

(from Titans' Daughters)

The first track from Jo Whitby's new EP signals a darkening of tone and a raising of stakes. Read my review of Titans' Daughters here.

Bellowhead: Folk the Rules

"All music is folk music. I ain't never heard no horse sing a song." 

- Louis Armstrong

When you think of folk music, what do you picture? A sea of beards, acoustic guitars, and seriousness? Or some guy bouncing around in a sparkly silver waistcoat while two violinists have a dance-off and a trumpet player buoys the audience to join in with the actions?

Photo by Cardiff Folk Club. Not pictured: sparkly waistcoat (that came out later!)

I caught the Cardiff leg of Bellowhead's farewell tour last night, and if there's one thing I learned from that show (and from the band's twelve-year career at large), it's that folk music can be pretty much whatever you want it to be. Yes, most of the songs they played were based on traditional compositions, and yes, there were a lot of fiddles involved. But therein lies Bellowhead's mad genius: these quintessentially 'folky' elements are blended and bastardised with all kinds of other influences, resulting in a sound that's utterly beyond categorisation yet unmistakeably still folk music at its core.