Category: CQAF2025 Tuesday 6 May

Luca Fogale’s voice is impossible to ignore, elevating songs rooted in the folk tradition to soulful hymns about the human condition.

Influenced by the likes of Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan, Luca’s reflective and sometimes melancholic songwriting pulls listeners into a deeply hypnotic meditation on redemption and transcendence.

The Canadian singer-songwriter is a two-time JUNO nominee (Canada’s Grammy equivalent) and his catalogue boasts over 250M streams.

Luca has released 3 acclaimed full-length albums – Safety (2016), Nothing is Lost (2020), and Run Where the Light Calls (2023). Luca has toured with Dermot Kennedy and Brett Eldridge and has headlined shows across Canada, the US, UK, Europe, Australia, and Japan.

Six years after their last studio album, Taylor Kirk’s Canadian band Timber Timbre finally releases a new record, “Lovage”- his most accomplished and engrossing album to date.

“Lovage” is an album marrying perverted piano ballads and spiritual jazz interludes on islands of exotica and psyche-prog with Spectoresque girl-group cabaret. Recorded in 2022 in Quebec with Mike Dubue (Hilotrons), the album features Olivier Fairfield (Fet Nat, Andy Shauf) and members of the Voices of Praise gospel choir (Howe Gelb).

Since releasing and extensively touring “Sincerely, Future Pollution” (2017), Taylor Kirk has been busy working as a producer on several full-length LP’s, including Joseph Martone’s “Honeybirds” and the sophomore recording “Nightshades” by This Lonesome Paradise.

Timber Timbre have quietly released two cassette-only EP’s, “I Am Coming To Paris” and “The Dissociation Tapes Volume1”. Finally returning with a new full-length entitled “Lovage,” the most accomplished and engrossing Timber Timbre album to date. Which isn’t to say that Taylor Kirk has merely refined his working methods. In fact, “Lovage” is a bona fide masterpiece, as Kirk manages to combine disparate influences that would otherwise seem mutually incompatible.

Together with producer-engineer Michael Dubue, he reconciles Brian Wilson’s rich sonic palette with the amused melancholy of Leonard Cohen. Kirk admits to revisiting Sun Ra, Dorothy Ashby and Alice Coltrane, as well as Italian singers such as Pino Daniele and Paolo Conte, which might explain the cinematic lightness of the new album.

Kirk returned to his native Ontario in 2019 after spending a few years in Quebec and Texas. He made it back just in time to sit out the Covid pandemic and regroup. “I moved back to Ontario where I had grown up, a place I left 20 years ago and swore I’d never return to. ‘Holy Motors’ is an homage to this place I love and hate-but also love to hate,” he says of the town where he spent the lockdown. “But it’s a good place to be trapped”.

One could say the same of the sonic landscapes he evokes on “Lovage”. It’s a wonderful album to be trapped on, a modern masterpiece for troubled times one will find oneself returning to again and again.

 

American singer-songwriter Sarabeth Tucek returned in 2023 after a decade-long intermission with the new moniker SBT and her long-awaited third album ‘Joan Of All’, which was issued world-wide on her own imprint Ocean Omen.

After the first single “The Gift” received heavy play on BBC Radio 6 Music courtesy of Marc Riley, Gideon Coe and Cerys Matthews, anticipation for the new double-album kicked into high gear, and it did not disappoint, hailed by critics and fans alike as her masterwork.

She followed up by mounting three full-band tours of the UK which saw her perform the epic ‘Joan Of All’ in its entirety. SBT now returns to the UK and Ireland in April/May 2025 for a very special, intimate set of acoustic shows with her longtime producer Luther Russell which will cut a swath through her whole catalog, including her classic self-titled debut, the much beloved sophomore album ‘Get Well Soon’ and of course the genre-defying, ‘Joan of All’.

Ben de la Cour

With songs that explore life’s murky corners and shadowy characters, Ben de la Cour’s music occupies the intersection between gothic Americana and dark, gritty folk.

Albums like Ben’s 2012 debut, Ghost Light and 2018’s career-shifting The High Cost of Living Strange chronicled not only that deep sense of restlessness but also his various attempts to wrestle his own vices into submission. The result is a haunting, harrowingly personal version of folk music that earned praise from outlets like American Songwriter and NPR.

Michael Cera Palin are an emotive indie-punk trio from Atlanta, GA. The band are noted for consciously vulnerable lyrics, a cathartically catchy sound, and an impassioned live show, all forged through a decade of cutting teeth in the genre-fluid arts landscape of their home.

MCP released two EPs from 2015-2018 before a premature hiatus. After derailed ambitions for their 2020 return (now to a notably larger listenership than they had previously left behind), the band retreated from the social dimension of the community to begin carving their new chapter, and finding a voice of their own.

They then released 2 singles, before starting toward an accelerating tour ethic since 2022, diligently assuring fans along the way that a debut full-length album would be with them in due time.

Whether owed to or despite their limited output, Michael Cera Palin’s work continues to accrue fervent support, with mounting anticipation of their new material.