(Rough Trade/Remote Control)

Canadian wünderkind gives us big, rangy folk tunes

‘Folk’ music – as if that appellation is big enough to encompass everything from Will Oldham to Lisa Mitchell – often veers giddily on a dialectic between ‘too much’ and ‘too little’. Given that folk minimalism has reached almost-absurd heights (I’m thinking of Tiny Vipers’ chilly masterpiece Life On Earth, a record that is almost autistic in its difficulty and micro-scale detail), it’s perhaps inevitable that there will be a backlash of OTT folk that layers on the instrumentation and emotion (think Mumford & Sons, who almost beat Muse in the histrionic stakes). Basia Bulat’s sophomore album, Heart Of My Own, is definitely in the latter camp, opening with the sturm-und-drang of Go On, in which Bulat laments “They begged you for your awful words / So let them know the burden of your blues” over a banjo, fiddle section, and a military tattoo. It’s no surprise to find out that Bulat wrote most of these songs while travelling around America and Canada’s midwest: they have the rangy feel of open skies, open roads, and a kind of quiet desolation that she shares with the best of North American folk. So when it’s good, it’s good: tracks Run and Sparrow are highlights for their deft songwriting matched with Bulat’s emotive voice and Howard Billerman’s dramatic instrumental arrangements. But too much emotion can be fatiguing, and by the end of Heart Of My Own I began to wish that Bulat would realise that although less may not always be more, more is not always more, either.

***½

CHAD PARKHILL

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