No Summer

Welcome to the Radie Peat academy of drone singing, for the powerful example of Lankum and how they have turned Irish folk music around on the contraflow of instrumental and vocal drone is all over this new record from Amelia Baker, who performs as Cinder Well after relocating from California to a small town in County Clare. The resulting music is a distillation of influences – Lankum to be sure, as well as Clare's strong live music scene, and her own US influences, the Americana Gothic strand of folk steeped in the juices of isolation and concentration. Think Anna & Elizabeth's The Invisible Comes to Us.

Cinder Well's background is in the west coast anarchist scene – squats, collectives, folk punk – and it was while touring Europe that she encountered Lankum, and embarked on a life-changing move to Clare. No Summer is the result, extracting intuitive performances from a repertoire that mixes her own songs with Appalachian numbers and powerful traditional songs such as Jean Ritchie's ‘The Cuckoo’, Roscoe Holcomb's ‘Wandering Boy’, and a tune that epitomises the whole project, ‘Queen of the Earth, Child of the Skies’, a west Virginian take on an Irish set dance. You'll find much to absorb you when you gaze into Cinder Well.