News Films

For all but aficionados of the genre, folk is pretty much as boring as pop music gets. Full of wholesome, earth types who like nothing more than to bore anyone who’ll listen with platitudes of woe and facsimile descriptions of loves lost and won. But put in the right hands, the bare structure of the music can be warped such an extent that it actually sounds not only good, but great.

Head of the class in this field is Films, who even goes as far as referencing Johnny Flynn in his songs in terms of doffing his cap to folk. But if you’re looking for reference points, it’s probably easiest to start with David Thomas Broughton’s layered, looped and skewed efforts, then work your way backwards. There’s a haunted heart at the centre of each of the Films efforts unearthed so far, but rather than being achingly dull, it’s all mildly sinister, the sense that something incredibly important and menacing has been left unsaid, a foreboding left only in the web of sound spun.

In a year where almost everything that sounds fresh is coming from people who’ve spent far too much time in their bedroom, messing around with Garageband and listening to old Warp releases, it’s encouraging to see an act doing it their own way and actually being bloody brilliant at it. They’re based in Leeds, which means it’s only a matter of time before the NME try and term it ‘psyche-Yorkshire’ or something equally ridiculous, but it’s interesting to wonder if anything with so much personality and texture could come from the nation’s capital where things seem much more black and white, rather than the fabulous grey area this occupies.

Matilda by FILMS