Webcuts Music

Gracing the paddocks of Kent for the 5th year is The Hop Farm Music Festival. Webcuts was lucky enough to attend last year and was clearly impressed us with the range and standard of acts and the ease of access. The line-up for 2012 is already shaping up with the announcement of headliners BOB DYLAN (UK exclusive), PETER GABRIEL AND THE NEW BLOOD ORCHESTRA (UK exclusive) and SUEDE (UK festival exclusive), as well as Ray Davies, Primal Scream, Psychedelic Furs, My Morning Jacket, Peter Hook and The Light and Richard Ashcroft sitting pretty amongst the big names.

HTRK have always been a difficult band to love. Once you got used to their decaying minimalism and the anonymity that pervaded their artwork, you realised they weren’t a band seeking attention, merely like-minded souls to tumble down their rabbit hole. They weren’t looking for you, you were looking for them. They ply romance as being one of their tenets, but their music is neither romantic nor seductive. More confessions of bitterness and jealousy from a self-loathing voyeur unable to look away from what attracts them, or the last words of a dying emotion.

From her isolated upbringing in rural Wisconsin, comined with a passion for opera, philosophy and industrial music, Nika Rosa Danilova aka Zola Jesus has created a name for herself as being a successor to the great Diamanda Galas and Lisa Gerrard with her haunting, otherworldly vocal style. Over the past three years Danilova has reached the point in her career where she is no longer an experimental, teenage noise-maker but an internationally celebrated electro-pop artist. Her third album Conatus is her most accomplished work to date, pushing beyond the dark melodrama of Stridulum II toward something that is emotionally breathtaking.

Folk bands are slowly going the way of the emo bands — cookie-cutter, predictable, uninspired, and inevitably becoming a parody of themselves because music is a business and the market dictates that consumers will always want more of what’s popular. The Beggar Folk fall nicely into the afore-mentioned folk music genre, however their music doesn’t seem to follow suit with the folk status quo. These are ballads and hymns, carved from trees and molded from soil. This music demands your attention and effortlessly passes any authenticity tests. It conjures up what real Americana and country music should conjure.