Following Folk Radio UK’s Top 100 Folk Music Albums of 2020 (read it here), a number of our review team share their personal Top 10 Albums of the Year.
Despite, or perhaps even because of, the pandemic there’s been a plethora of outstanding releases across a diversity of genres, from the simple and straightforward to the challenging and innovative. I could easily double the allotted tally, but I’ve agonised and worked to come up with 10 that have stood out above all. So, in alphabetical order (click on the title to read the full review):
Blackbird & Crow – Ailm
A raw and intense gothic folk noir experience from Donegal duo singer Maighréad Ní Ghrásta and slide guitarist Stephen John Doohan which brings together Irish folklore, blues, psychedelia and Americana in songs that seek to find healing. At times nerve-jangling, but how can you resist an album with a venomous track called A Pox On You.
Ben Bostick – Among The Faceless Crowd
Arguably for me the discovery of the year, Bostick’s quiet storm of an album is an empathetic and part autobiographical collection of melancholic and often forlorn songs about the plight of the disillusioned working man in today’s harsh economic climate where the American Dream has become a nightmare of unemployment with its impact on relationships and self-esteem. This sits up there alongside The Ghost of Tom Joad.
Bruce Springteen – Letter To You
Reunited the E-Street Band for a collection of powerful classic Springsteen bluecollar anthems that pivot around thoughts of mortality and friendship, including the first official recordings of three songs from his first demos for Columbia Records, this is the Boss at his guitar-ringing best.
Diana DeMuth – Misadventure
A stunningly confident and powerful debut from the Massachusett’s Americana singer-songwriter who draws on influences as diverse as Bonnie Raitt, Springsteen and The Lumineers on story-songs based around piano and guitar and founded on her journey to self-discovery and struggle with ADD. Audaciously rhyming Nantucket with fuck it, as I wrote, it’s the misadventure of a lifetime.
Eliza Gilkyson – 2020
Born from the struggles of a divided America, the songs here are a call for unity and a reminder that, despite the ugliness that surrounds, there is still beauty to be found. Ranging from plaintive folksiness to gospel blues and addressing the heartless of the current administration towards those most in need, the victims of countless church and school shootings and, at one point calling Trump’s racist segregationist landlord father, Setting covers of both Where Have All the Flowers Gone and A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall alongside her own protest songs, it is, quite, literally, an album of the year.
David Keenan – A Beginner’s Guide To Bravery
With a lyrical acumen and poetic sense redolent of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, the Irish singer-songwriter’s debut is a work of passion and dark beauty, a heady amalgam of Van Morrison, Tom Waits and Tim Buckley that takes its boho bard inspirations from his hometown in County Louth as well as other literary influences such as TS Eliot. Sung – or at times slurred – in a voice old beyond his years, the songs extending into dramatic narratives or pared to intimate portraits, it’s a unique experience.
Luke Jackson – Journals
Unquestionably possessed of one of the most distinctive voice and guitar playing style in the contemporary folk and blues scene, and an incredible live performer, this, recorded with his trio and additional piano contains some of his finest work to date, part informed by life on the road and part capturing the emotions of souls in search of a foundation and companionsip. In particular, a song about the true story of a downed WWII Spitfire pilot whose plane crashed into the very tree where he and his lover courted and a song in memory of his late grandmother well up with devastating emotional impact.
The Marriage – Imagined Sunsets
Former Ahab members Kirtsen Adamson and Dave Burn now resurface, with some additional pedal steel, as this folk rock/Celticana duo, who, in their melodies, the guitar work and harmonies, frequently summon thoughts of vintage Richard and Linda Thompson. Songs that embrace lost souls and bruised romance, charting break-ups as well as wryly using the image of burning toast to sum up a loving relationship.
Merry Hell – Emergency Lullabies
Recorded almost totally in lockdown, the band continues to prove they’re one of the world’s finest purveyors of rousing folk-rock anthems, this very much an album of the times with its celebrations of those on the frontline and the call to unite in times of trouble. The urge to raise your fists into the air, link arms and sing along is impossible to resist.
Tom Ovans – Crows In The Corn
Another stripped back, acoustic album, the veteran singer-songwriter’s parched and cracked, life-seasoned voice and style often evocative of Dylan, his folk blues narratives are haunted by tales of redemption, losers, survivors and ghosts that yet mingles tenderness with the pain he recounts.