Bedroom Community

 Sam Amidon sees no difference between a 19th-century folk ballad and a 21st-century avant-garde instrumental suite. In bridging the very old and the very new... he has managed to meld the rural and the urban, the organic and the synthetic, the oral tradition and the written score  

"Sam Amidon reinvents public-domain songs (plus one modern-day ringer) as rustic mood music for watching distant super-novas explode. But the results have none of the musty aftertaste such a description implies, contrasting pretty sounds with violent lyrical undercurrents."

“The combination of artists on this album deliver such an intense experience and I can’t help but be fascinated by it all. I’m quite in awe to be honest, and I use such words very sparingly when I talk about music. This is certainly his best work to date.”

 Amidon - with Sigurdsson, Muhly, multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily and on Beth Orton - brings a heightened reality and off-register colour to these black-and-white broadsides.  

[These performances] are passively beautiful, combed-over, thought-out, and then re-remembered fondly, wistfully... Yet that passivity is the key to the earnest openness that makes Amidon’s new album transcend.

 I’ll keep it short, because the more time you spend reading this, the less time you have to listen to Sam Amidon’s new album, I See The Sign, and it would really be a shame if you didn’t spend the next occasion you find yourself alone in the company of these friendly, forgiving, firelit songs.  

 

 Two and a Half Questions with Sam Amidon  

 

 Sam Amidon’s music is bigger and better than any retrospective reworkings. For this is contemporary music, providing an outlet for forgotten sounds and breathing oxygen into new creations.  

 

 I See the Sign ... his interpretations are so singular that it stops mattering how (or if) these songs existed before—all that matters is how they exist now.  

 

“this IS an epochal masterpiece – placing it side by side with the finest albums of the last four decades”

As with ‘All Is Well’, there are arrangements here that take your breath away…....this album is another complete success for the most interesting and promising folk musician in North America today

With All Is Well, Sam Amidon has crafted a precious gem of a record, all in nuances and shades, with delicate overtones and airy harmonies. Sigurðsson’s production is light and subtle yet it gives these songs fantastic depth and contrast without ever overshadowing Amidon’s delivery.

"sky-scrapingly great ... All Is Well is viscerally stunning, comforting, upsetting, entrancing; as long as he can make art like this, Amidon can skip the formality of 'writing songs' forever"

"A veritable classic, a standard for comparisons in this genre from now on. Not to be missed."

"Nothing less than a goose-bump-manufacturing sonic piéce de résistance"

 All Is Well a very forward-thinking album, despite its reliance on traditional tunes. With his team of musicians working so closely together, Amidon doesn't just update the old world to the new, but finds the roots of the new world in the old.  

"In an era of overheated Nick Drake comparisons, Amidon is eerily close to the real thing, singing in a fragile but certain tenor against the deep breath and soft sweep of Nico Muhly’s orchestrations."