Chris Cleverley – We Sat Back and Watched It Unfold
The Birmingham singer-songwriter’s second album takes a quantum leap to expand his musical landscape and lyrical acumen with an album anchored around a theme of mental health issues and anxiety and rich in memorable melodies and catchy choruses. Featuring contributions by Kim Lowings, Kathy Pilkington, Lukas Drinkwater and Sam Kelly, it offers songs of falling in love alongside ruminations on dubious quick-fix solutions and laments for the imploding NHS while, on The Low Light Low, calling on the need for inclusivity to survive and rise above a society riven by divisions. An album that elevates him from young hopeful to one of the most vital voices of today’s folk generation.
While touching on the personal, making extensive use of piano and filtered through a strong feminist perspective, this is even more overtly political than her previous work, manifesting her championing of the downtrodden and disenfranchised of Trump’s America and the fight to restore the ideals upon which the nation was founded as she declares “It’s gonna take building a bridge not building a wall”. This is Erlewine’s What’s Goin’ On.
Rachel Harrington – Hush The Wild Horses
Returning after eight years spent on family issues, Harrington is back in the saddle with a real thoroughbred that’s informed by both her finding both sobriety and new love, but also a raw confessional of childhood sexual abuse and a painful letter to her addict brother. There’s tragedy running through the album’s veins, which also contains the poignant Mekong Delta about her Vietnam vet uncle’s suicide while on the yearningly sung I Meant To Go To Memphis she sings “I meant to find myself/But who I was passed on”. Ultimately though, while acknowledging the past, this is an album about new starts, and Harrington is clearly off to a head start.
One of the UK’s most distinctive voices, here in trio format Jackson ranges from stark and atmospheric blues to soulful doo-wop and the almost hymnal on songs that can be both playful, such as Cherry Picker and Aimee, or cut to the emotional quick, as he does on Red Oak’s true story of wartime love and loss and the deeply personal celebration of his late paternal grandmother, A Queen In Her Own Way. All topped off by a sublime version of Who Knows Where The Time Goes. Simply awesome.
Daria Kulesh – Earthly Delights
Kulesh’s third album extends the Russian folklore and heritage of its predecessor, but also embraces English folk rock influences to a greater extent than hitherto, notably so on the title track that sets a pagan lust for life against the biblical narrative of virtue and sin. Combining songs drawing on Russian legend with several embracing on Irish influences, the cabaret-like galumph of Shame and Glory also celebrates those who, like Florence Foster Jenkins, refuse to let lack of talent stand in the way of artistic expression. Joined by the likes of Phil Beer, Jonny Dyer and fellow former Kara member Marina Osman, it’s a stunning showcase of her magical storytelling and the power and delicacy of her voice.
A complement to her memoir of the same name, Moorer addresses the trauma and emotional aftermath of her parents’ murder-suicide in a starkly arranged album that cuts straight to the heart. An act of catharsis and emotional release, it is suffused with pain, but also generosity and compassion as, while not forgiving her father’s actions, she finds understanding and acknowledges the legacy inherited from both him and her mother, appropriately closing with the Mary Gauthier co-write Heal. The finest of her career to date.
Danny Schmidt – Standard Deviation
In reflective mood, Schmidt ranges from joy to melancholy on an album bookended by the birth of a child and the loss of one. In-between, the title track serves as a testament to his songwriting wherein he can weave themes of romance, gender discrimination, the sexiness of a smart mind in a song that draws on theoretical physics, string theory, quantum mechanics and descriptive statistics. Transformation underpins several numbers, whether through becoming a parent or in Newport ’65 recalling Dylan going electric, a song that talks of how artists are often imprisoned by the expectations of their audience. Ending with We Need A Better Word, a heartbreaking number about miscarriages, it’s his masterpiece.
Sound of the Sirens – This Time
Exeter duo Abbe Martin and Hannah Wood seal their reputation with an ambitious, musically diverse third album that, part break-up/part self-realisation, features no fewer than 15 tracks, and not a filler among them. Veined with a sense of empowerment and self-belief, it’s crammed with strong melodies and irresistible hooks, at times calling Thea Gilmore to mind. Relationships both toxic and healing loom large as does the need to find balance between surrendering yourself to someone else but also not losing sight of your individuality. And, if, at the end of the day, things fall apart not looking back in anger but parting as friends. “This time right now”, they sing on the closing track. It most certainly is.
Amy Speace – Me & The Ghost of Charlemagne
One of the great contemporary Americana singer-songwriters with an album addressing the clash between dreams and reality, trials and triumphs and trying to make sense of life’s swings and roundabouts. Deservedly accruing a sheaf of award nominations, it draws on the loneliness of a life on the road and the torments of self-doubt and domestic abuse while Ginger Ale and Lorna Doones brilliantly sketches the ordeals of a woman waiting for an abortion, Through it all, however, she finds a sense of hope, strikingly expressed on the reverie of Some Dreams Do and a haunting cover of Ben Glover’s benediction, Kindness. Utterly wonderful.
Caroline Spence – Mint Condition
Her major-label debut sees the Nashville-based Spence in her finest form yet on a guitar-jangling album that melds infectious hooks with poignant lyrics, at times recalling the heyday of The Bangles. The journey that’s led her here is celebrated in the upbeat Long Haul while road stories are also to be found on Angels or Los Angeles and Song About A City. Given the recurring themes of finding the courage to strike out and embrace self-belief and life in the moment, she also pushes her voice further than before on the slow swayalong Wait On The Wine. As the title says, she’s in mint condition.
Emily Mae Winters – High Romance
Quite simply one of the year’s incandescent best as the Birmingham-born Winters fully embraces her Southern Americana influences, her voice as powerful as a raging thunderstorm or as gentle as a butterfly’s wing. From the opening gospel-blues slow waltz setting of 19th-century poem Come Live In My Heart & Pay No Rent through to the simple stripped back acoustic song of love and hope One Of These Days, this is an album forged in molten passions as it concerns themes of love, displacement, restlessness, depression and desire. Four years ago, Gretchen Peters’ Blackbirds set the benchmark by which future Americana albums would be measured. Winters has set a new one.