Long Live Brown Wimpenny

I'm not English enough to fully understand the North-South divide, but this Manchester Sunday-morning living-room collective of 11 musicians went out of its way to cobble together folk tunes about the industrial north, set them to their own sprawling, sometimes punkish, arrangements, and maintain an all-acoustic aesthetic that employs drone but doesn't overdo it. (There really is nothing worse than a 90-minute album that does nothing but drone.) Socially and politically, this music is very much in the vein of Dick Gaughan, but musically its more like Lankum and Shovel Dance Collective. This is exactly the kind of folk I adore: starts out loose and rusty but grows tighter as it plays on, and you begin to realize that its rust is its shine.