Yellow Bird - Edda Lou (2018)

The Berlin-based group Yellow Bird - featuring the paired voices of Manon Kahle and Lucia Cadotsch - channels Anglo-American folk music into a sound that feels both very old and brand new. The manner of the music-making has a vintage charm, a resonant earthiness, an old soul; but the voices are fresh, the emotions they evoke timeless. After a debut album, 'Sing', that included rambunctious, on-the-fly covers of old American country songs and rootsy pop - "Lovesick Blues," "Walking After Midnight," "Lazy Bones" - Yellow Bird presents its subtly artful second album 'Edda Lou', featuring all original songs. Manon, who wrote most of these songs, not only sings but plays fiddle, ukulele and banjo, while Lucia adds melodica and percussion. The distinctive instrumentation of the album also includes Uli Kempendorff on various clarinets, Ronny Graupe on guitar and bass, as well as Tim Lorenz, Michael Griener and Max Weissenfeldt on drums. Yellow Bird - with its mix of American and European backgrounds, as well as pre-modern and post-modern influences - harks back to an analog era as a respite to our digital age; there is a homespun, heartfelt quality to 'Edda Lou' that bewitches.