Kris Drever

Folk music has witnessed something of a revival over the course of the last two years. Fuelled by the rising popularity on both sides of the Atlantic of artists like Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes, Laura Marling, Frank Turner and Mumford & Sons, the genre, under the new guise of ‘indie-folk’, has recently permeated the mainstream on a level rarely seen since the rise of Dylan, Cohen and Mitchell in the 1960s.

But while variants of folk music (indie-folk, folk-rock, alt-folk, pop-folk) intermittently appear on the radar of popular culture, traditional folk has more often than not remained an underground phenomenon—followed only by a minority of dedicated purists who crave a version of the music that is untainted by contemporary influences.

Hailing from the island of Orkney, and having spent his youth listening to Metallica and Pantera, Kris Drever might seem like an unlikely figurehead for a new generation of young musicians still carrying the torch of traditional folk music—but he is. Having just released his second album Mark The Hard Earth, Drever won a BBC Folk Award for Best Newcomer in 2007 and has since been hailed as the “standard bearer” of the “folk revival” by Q magazine.

Appearing in Edinburgh alongside multi-instrumentalist Anna Massie, Drever captivates a filled-to-capacity Bongo Club with a diverse range of songs that span his career so far. New originals such as title-track "Mark The Hard Earth" are blended with covers of classic old Scottish folk songs like "Farewell Tae Fiunary", while Massie contributes occasional instrumentals that punctuate a set largely dominated by Drever’s material.

For the duration of the performance the audience remain still and silent, hypnotized by the simple power of words and songs that have in some instances transcended generations. Drever is a reminder that the heart of traditional folk music continues to beat strongly, even if that beat continues to drift under the radar of the mainstream.