The Daily Spin II

The Paper Kites | Young North

Welcome back to the Daily Spin. For the uninitiated, this is the series in which I review an album every day of 2025.

As was the case two years ago, my favorite song from each album can be found at the playlist linked here.

Album: Young North (2013)

Artist: The Paper Kites

Link:

Most albums in the folk genre have a sort of timeless nature about them - part of the genre’s charm, if you ask me, that it’s often a little challenging to pinpoint when exactly on the timeline a record drops within roughly 20-year bands - with the exception of the early 2010s.

Maybe it’s my own personal deep-dive into music of this ilk around that time, maybe it’s the fact that Phillip Phillips basically became radio god for a few months with ‘Home’ and was followed shortly after by Mumford & Sons, The Lumineers, and Of Mice and Men all breaking into the mainstream in a way that hadn’t really happened (to my knowledge) in some time - but there’s something about music released in this era.

It’s great - that’s the thing. As much as I think it’s been overdone like a forgotten-about burger, there’s a reason it was everywhere - when done well, this is so lovely. Few instruments are as lovely in tandem as an acoustic guitar and a piano, and Young North holds both in abundance.

Though I think much of the Paper Kites’ work is better later on, when they smooth out some of the edges and give their sound more dimension, this is a really lovely effort that hits on the emotional beats as well as it does the sonic. Can’t ask for much more than that, nor can I realistically fault them too heavily for the saturation of their genre.

Rating: 8/10

Best Tracks: Paint

Worst Tracks: Leopold Street