Recommend Pastoral Albums

'Hark The Village Wake' Steeleye Span

 

If this thread proves anything it's that there's no such musical genre or description known as "pastoral" --- the recommendations are all over the map, from John Tesh to Jethro Tull.

 

Band of Horses

 

Try Queen's debut album and Comus' First Utterance.

 

I wa going to say that!

 

How about much of Bo Hansson's ouvre?

 

I'd also add Phillips' Private Parts & Pieces. Specifically, the first volume.

 

Great call here, especially with Model Village. I have had few albums put me in a particular space like this one does. It also uses a "day in the life" structure.

 

By my own loose definition, it's music that evokes an open country side. Something that reminds me of lying in an open field, looking up at a blue sky.

 

The Kinks. Morning Song from Preservation Act I

 

The Byrds, Pale Blue from Byrdmaniax

 

RVW's 'Pastoral Symphony' is a thinly cloaked war elegy, and the countryside it inspired was French.

To me though it sounds like Hampshire

 

XTC's most 'Pastoral' album

They were getting there with 'English Settlement', much to the disdain of the press of the time.

There's a lot of Floyd in that idiom as well, the 'More' soundtrack and several other tunes are well in that idiom ('Granchester Meadows', 'Fat Old Sun', 'Summer '68).

 

I second Fantasia Lindum by Amazing Blondel.

 

All the Fleet Foxes stuff, like just about every song they've done. From "Helplessness Blues":

If I had an orchard, I'd work till I'm raw
If I had an orchard, I'd work till I'm sore
And you would wait tables and soon run the store

Gold hair in the sunlight, my light in the dawn
If I had an orchard, I'd work till I'm sore
If I had an orchard, I'd work till I'm sore
Someday I'll be like the man on the screen

Pastoral! Not sure what's on about the man on the screen, but I can smell the apples and cider (and cow pies) from here. Or maybe I'm confusing "pastoral" with "pasture". I think those two words are at least cousins though.

 

What no mention of Traffic's John Barleycorn Must Die!

 

Laura Marling - Alas I Cannot Swim.

 

Anyone have/recommend these?

I highly recommend the Welsh band Gorky's Zygotic Mynci and many of their albums, such as "The Blue Trees." As another said, the Fleet Foxes albums are very pastoral.

 

Good point, an album that sounds completely like it was recorded up a muddy track in Berkshire.

 

It's a brilliant song, regardless of how 'pastoral' it is.