This time last year, when I picked Richard Dawson’s 2020 as my favourite album of 2019, we had no idea how the next twelve months might progress, whether Dawson’s remarkable state-of-the-nation address might serve as an indicator of some kind of turning point. Perhaps some of us thought things might be slowly getting better. Perhaps some of us didn’t. But it’s fair to say that most people didn’t expect the year to turn out quite like it did. I won’t say any more on that front – 2020 isn’t over yet, dying beasts have a tendency to lash out, and I don’t want to tempt fate.
What I will say is pretty much what I always say: music is amazing and there has been a lot of great stuff over the last twelve months. A few things have changed though. Many of us – reviewers, armchair critics, casual listeners – have had more time to listen to a greater volume of music. And musicians have responded to the crisis in the best way, maybe the only possible way: they have created, and they have found new ways of sharing their work.
Music has been good to me this year, perhaps more so than ever before. The ten albums that follow have all played a part in that.
click on the title to read the full review
Bill Callahan – Gold Record
After a break of half a decade Callahan was back with a bang – albeit a quiet bang – in 2019 with Shepherd In A Sheepskin Vest. Gold Record appeared a year later. A shorter, more punchy record than its predecessor, but wider-ranging in its themes, it distills the latter-day Callahan songwriting ethos into a collection of typically wry, country-tinged songs about marriage, uncanny neighbours and fake protest singers. It cements its creator’s place as one of those rare – very rare – artists who start out great and just carry on getting better.
Shirley Collins – Heart’s Ease
Bill Callahan’s five years without an album is nothing compared with Shirley Collins, who went 38 years before her 2016 comeback. Like Callahan, this is her second album after a hiatus, and it is one of the most compelling pieces of folk music you are likely to hear in this or any year. It’s tempting to think of what might have been had Collins continued recording through those long decades, but it is perhaps wiser to enjoy the brilliant peaks of her career as they occur, in the hope that there will be many more in the future.
Burd Ellen – Says The Never Beyond
A wintry, drone-laden masterpiece on which traditional song is given a thrilling, experimental makeover. Songs that explore the weirdest of seasonal rituals and the edgelands between paganism and Christianity.
The Silver Field – Sing High! Sing Low!
Spooked, experimental computer-folk from songwriter-composer Coral Rose, who traces the eeriest of paths from machine music to nature’s earthiest corners, touching on David Lynch, W.B. Yeats and a kind of pagan library music.
Herman Dune – Notes From Vinegar Hill
If iPhones and Snoop Dogg and Covid-19 and Uber had all been around in 1969, then Stephen Stills or Robbie Robertson might have come up with a record like this. As personal in tone as it is wide-ranging in lyrical scope, David Ivar’s latest sees him weld anti-folk’s smart songwriting to a sound that is part Big Pink, part Laurel Canyon. It’s a brilliantly observed outsider’s portrait of LA, composed at the most demanding of times.
Stella Sommer – Northern Dancer
Queen of German indie, Sommer has carved out a solo niche as a gifted chanteuse. Northern Dancer is an album full of wide seascapes and intimate moments of personal reflection, all bathed in finely produced chamber-folk. At times grand and sweeping, at others delicate, it is at all times imbued with an intangible and flickering beauty.
Stick In The Wheel – Hold Fast
Quite simply, there is no-one producing traditional music with as much vitality, wit, anger and disdain for the status quo as Stick In The Wheel right now. On their third album proper they shine a light on the marginalised corners of folk music’s history: many of these songs are rendered in delicious dialects, from Polari to 17th century criminal slang to the contemporary language of the meme. They also find time to be musically inventive, incorporating minimal synths, psychy guitars and free improvisation.
Cunning Folk – A Casual Invocation
Like Stick In The Wheel, George Hoyle (Cunning Folk) is something of an iconoclast, whose knowledge of traditional forms and their place in the musical landscape is matched by his constant willingness to usurp or transcend those forms. He is a radical thinker and talented writer whose latest album takes in krautrock, Neil Young-inspired acoustic folk, psych-pop and blues, all the while exploring the strange and occult backroads of the British tradition.
Brigid Mae Power – Head Above The Water
Another intensely personal album from Irish singer and guitarist Power. She is an ambiguous but enlightening voice on subjects like gender inequality and trauma, while her star-studded backing band (including Alasdair Roberts and Peter Broderick) help to conjure up a sonic backdrop that at times approaches the classic sound of The Band or Sandy Denny’s solo output.
The Rheingans Sisters – Receiver
Anyone who thinks there is a lack of innovation or experimentation in the Brit folk scene needs to hear this album pronto. Brilliantly played traditional tunes jostle for position with insightful and highly relevant songwriting, and the whole thing feeds back into the album’s beautiful, lovingly produced packaging. You can listen to it as an album, or you can experience it as a kind of mixed-media art installation. Either way, it’s an awesome achievement.