Emily Barker & The Red Clay Halo

Almanac, CD album
“This is a dream of a record. A new Marling, then? No, Barker offers something else..."
BBC Music editor’s choice Feb 2011

Pause, digital single
“The crisp, tight vocal harmonies provided by The Red Clay Halo make this a mesmerizing, angelic piece of music that somehow lifts you out of its own loneliness.” Drowned In Sound

Almanac, CD album
“This is an album that, for all its watery themes, spills over with blood, guts and a robust appetite for life, with Barker’s narrative-driven lyrics pitched against duelling fiddles, see-sawing accordions and a particularly gothic-sounding pipe organ on the exquisitely eerie Pause. Highly recommended.” Metro - various

‘chamber-folk of the highest order’ – Rock n Reel

‘stripped free of studio frippery and all the better for its carefree simplicity’ **** - Q

‘strong melodies that at times evoke images of Richard and Linda Thompson… as strong a collection of acoustic folk songs that I have heard for a long time’ 8/10 – Americana-uk.com

‘There’s that haunted folksy sound to Emily’s vocals which recalls Natalie Merchant’s expressive voice… a superb album’ – Pennyblackmusic.co.uk

‘stunningly beautiful’ – Electric Ghost

‘her fellow Australians The Waifs are an obvious comparison, but perhaps a more relevant name is that of Laura Veirs - with All Love Knows and particularly Disappear sounding a lot like the American's earlier work’ – Musicomh.com

‘music that's going to take you away from the scummy smog filled streets and leave you in a warm forest dappled with green light shining through the leaves of sycamores and ancient oak’ – Unpeeled.net

- various

Pete Paphides
5 stars

The guitar, crisp and dewy, and the understated accordion wheeze were Appalachian in flavour. But the very first line of Nostalgia — Emily Barker’s opening song at this basement show — referenced tram wires “crossing Melbourne skies”. Therein lay perhaps the reason why Barker hasn’t been garlanded with quite the zeal lavished upon some of her contemporaries.

It might be that we don’t expect a woman from Western Australia to slip into an idiom more commonly associated with a certain sort of American singer — one who uses the revenue accrued from a deft updating of back-porch traditions to replenish her wardrobe of floral print dresses.

But, over the course of two exquisite solo albums, Barker has easily shown herself to be the equal of, say, Gillian Welch or Laura Cantrell. Playing with the all-female band that she assembled for her Despite the Snow album last year, Barker’s delivery on the keening break-up dispatches of Sideline hinted at the aftertaste of an emotional pill that had yet to dissolve.

Her persona between songs couldn’t have been more different and that only compounded her charms. She bore a ruddy bonhomie that you would sooner expect of an Australian nanny in Kensington than a forensic dissector of love’s travails. But that might have been the red wine, which she apologetically glugged, disingenuously pointing out that there appeared to be no smaller glasses to hand.

It wasn’t merely that her band were superb but that they seemed bound by an almost psychic attunement. In a new song called Little Deaths the violinist Anna Jenkins and cellist Jo Silverstone circled in on Barker’s vocals with a predatory, pensive air. As Gill Sandell swapped her accordion for flute, the sound migrated towards a seam of baroque English chamber-folk for which Nick Drake has latterly become a byword. Fiddle-abetted covers of Neil Young’s Look Out for My Love and Mike Waterson’s Bright Phoebus were well chosen.

Anyone new to Barker’s oeuvre would have been forgiven for thinking that the song that followed, Fields of June — an instantly familiar love-gone-wrong double-hander — had been kicking around since Cecil Sharp was in short trousers. Not so. The hills have yet to be emptied of gold if you know where to look. - The Times (UK)