July 12, 2011

Album Review: Richard Young - 'Amplifying Host'

English folk riddled with American blues

6 / 10 He might have been born in Harpenden, Hertfordshire, but Richard Youngs ’ music imagines an England after a global warming catastrophe has turned the south of our country into a fly-blown dust bowl.

The music of ‘Amplifying Host’ blends baked American blues with the ghosts of this island’s folk tradition to wonderful effect, especially on ‘Tessellations’, which is like coming across a bedraggled family cooking beans around a campfire in the tinder-dry ruins of what was once a chocolate-box timber-framed cottage. ‘A Hole In The Earth’ is a mournful despairing for water: subterranean Home Counties blues, if you will.

Luke Turner

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