Ohio’s Motherfolk made a strong impression with their 2016 sophomore record Fold, and now they're sharing a series of live performance videos in support of its newly-released deluxe edition. Fold's gutsy folk-rock is sprinkled with found-sound recordings and other production flourishes, but this new video for "Fold II" pares the six-piece down to original members Bobby Paver and Nathan Dickerson to raw effect. The video was filmed at St. Francis Xavier Church in the band's native Cincinnati, and features a single long shot that opens tight on Paver's guitar and slowly skates backward down the ..read more

Though they started off as the amateur pals of Sufjan Stevens who only recorded a debut because the musical megastar pushed them to as a pet project, Vito and Monique Aiuto have now been playing music together as The Welcome Wagon for going on sixteen years. They're seasoned musicians, and they've grown to take their career as The Welcome Wagon more seriously, even as Monique continues to work as a public school teacher and Vito, a Presbyterian minister, continues to pastor a congregation in their home neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. While the duo's first album had Stevens' ornate fol ..read more

The Collection (David Wimbish at center) It’s common for a bit of winnowing to happen in the time between a band’s first and second album, but in the three years since its debut LP Ars Moriendi, Greensboro, North Carolina’s The Collection has been through an extraordinary amount of change. Born from an intentional community partly inspired by Shane Claiborne's The Irresistible Revolution, the collective originally featured a dozen-plus members who joined bandleader and songwriter David Wimbish onstage to perform motley, raucous folk anthems brimming with gang vocals, woodwinds, brass, and str ..read more

For anyone who cares about good worship music, the Porter's Gate Worship Project is like manna from heaven. Over the summer, the initiative convened a huge, ridiculously talented pool of musicians (there are way too many to list) in New York City to collaboratively write and record songs for the project’s first volume, entitled Work Songs. Mason Jar Music put together a live video for the album’s opening track, by singer-songwriter Madison Cunningham, and it is astonishingly beautiful stuff. "Little Things With Great Love" was written by Audrey Assad (with Cunningham and Bifrost Arts producer ..read more

  5.3 self-released / 2017 For anyone who grew up playing 8-bit RPGs, the sound of dungeon synth music will instantly call to mind long journeys, but Swedish chiptune artist Digre's The Way of a Pilgrim is almost certainly the first time the genre's metallic bleeps, bloops, and drones have signified a spiritual sojourn rather than a trek through an enemy-filled overworld. A "searching pagan" and black metal musician (how Scandinavian), Olof Svante converted to Eastern Orthodoxy after witnessing the baptism of a friend at a parish in his small town of Umeå and being moved by its power. He ..read more

  7.8 self-released / 2017 "You don't suck, you don't suck, you don't suck..." Such is the backing refrain on "You Are Someone Special", the upbeat encouragement-anthem from Jay Tholen's new record. You could miss it on the first pass if you're not listening for it, but the line is everything great about Tholen and his music in microcosm - giggle-inducing, weirdly uplifting, and as earnest as a kid's picture drawn just to tell you they love you. Sincerity pervades everything about Celestial Archive - you can practically feel Tholen straining to reach through your headphones with a big, s ..read more

In 2016, songwriter Ronnie Ferguson shut himself in a remote cabin in northern Michigan to sit, pray, read a pile of spiritual books, and face the grief that had lingered since his father's death when Ronnie was only a teenager. STREAKING IN TONGUES' Life Support was the eventual product, a raw document of Ferguson's depression and grieving process. Like similarly-themed records, Sufjan Stevens' Carrie and Lowell and this year's A Crow Looked at Me by Mount Eerie, it's a gauntlet of a listen, but a work of sterling quality. Today, Spirit You All is proud to premiere the music video for one of ..read more

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