Joseph Allred’s latest LP on Feeding Tube finds the multifaceted musician fingerpicking their acoustic guitar with an air of grace and classical gravitas.

Available now on vinyl and digital, Folk Guitar is Allred channeling the pastoral old-world stylings of guitarists like John Renbourn, as well as the melancholy of 17th century lute music. As with any of Allred’s music, this is just the starting point, and plenty of other disparate and oftentimes obscure styles, forms and influences can be felt embedded within the artist’s grand fantasias.

With gentle melodies and renaissance-like trills that crossbreed with early 20th century blues phrasings, Allred’s compositions here feel at once both ancient and modern, rustic and also academic (in the most organic and modest of ways, of course). There’s a great reverence for the resonating quality of their instrument here, in addition to some truly remarkable dancing fretwork. This is an album to listen to closely and to study, as its complexities and subtleties reveal themselves more upon every listen.

As the record comes to a very ethereal close with the soft and airy reverie that is “Their Silvery Light,” it becomes very clear that Allred has crafted yet another total classic in the solo guitar canon. Click here to order your copy from Feeding Tube today.

-KH