There was a lot of really great music this year, in the folk world and beyond. Even more so than usual, if my nerdy little spreadsheet of things I’ve enjoyed is anything to go by. Perhaps the strangeness of the previous year served as artistic inspiration. Perhaps there was a backlog of ideas waiting to be released into the world. Perhaps it was a subconscious or conscious effort on the part of the thousands of hardworking musicians, promoters, producers, writers, editors and various other music industry people to get things moving again, to make sure we can all enjoy the art form that we love in the way it was meant to be enjoyed.
It was a year in which many of us went to our first gigs or festivals in a while, which meant real, sometimes scary, interaction with like-minded people and with our favourite musicians. The outside world, for some of us at least, is still a little bit strange (wasn’t it always?), but crikey, it’s good to get back out into it.
Even so, it’s not really surprising that some of the best music this year promised a kind of solace. Many of the albums below offer an immersive experience. There are drones aplenty, hazy shimmers on every horizon, minimalism mutated into strange but comforting landscapes. And then there are the cats amongst the pigeons, the bands (Stick In The Wheel, Arab Strap) making sure we don’t forget our current predicament. It was a year of necessary music as well as beautiful music, and these ten albums represent some of the best it had to offer.
Grouper – Shade
Liz Harris’s music always seems to operate at an elemental level, and her latest is no exception. It’s all oscillations and ripples. Its very structure seems like the breathing of some inscrutable organism, swaying between hushed acoustic balladry and hypnotic low-level distortion. Shade is an experience in itself, but it also has the power to enhance the listener’s experience of any given situation: you could happily listen to this album in a hot bath or on a cold winter walk, at work or in bed. Harris’s guitar and voice have a way of altering the atmosphere in incremental, barely perceptible wobbles: notes hang in the air, suspended by invisible threads, vocal phrases emerge from the haze, melodies suggest themselves then retreat. Hers is a unique and subtle musical vision
It represents fifteen years of work but feels like a single moment in time, a moment that moves from crisp clarity to haunting indistinctness and back again.
Shannon Lay – Geist
Like the Grouper album, Geist works so well because it creates a mood that is at once specific and hard to pin down. Lay conjures the spirit of Laurel Canyon, the heady, weird folk of Linda Perhacs and the bright intensity of early Joni Mitchell, but there is something stranger going on beneath the surface, something that is closer to the lysergic, cultish exaltation of the Incredible String Band, an ancient energy that seems to come from a kind of spirit world (‘geist’ of course is the German for spirit or ghost).
Her vocal performances throughout (and particularly on the near-a cappella Awaken And Allow) are quietly breathtaking, and her guitar playing is full of ringing depth and perfectly-weighted restraint.
C. Joynes – Poor Boy On The Wire
Joynes is one of the UK’s finest guitarists, able to fuse influences from Brit-folk, American primitivism, African and Asian musical forms and even post-rock, sometimes all in the space of a track or two and all with just an electric guitar. Poor Boy On The Wire is his first actual solo album in a decade (though the intervening years have produced a wealth of fruitful collaborations), and it shines from start to finish, full of diverse, impassioned and enviably accomplished playing.
Stick In The Wheel – Tonebeds For Poetry
A trippy dub-folk mixtape. A psych-synth library music document. London grunge. Music for a Tudor rave. Tonebeds For Poetry is all of this and more. Nicola Kearey and Ian Carter recognise that British musical heritage is gloriously mongrel in form, and their joyous hybrid art form is also a trenchant criticism of intolerance and narrowmindedness. That they manage to hold it all together is a minor miracle, but the world is a much better place for it.
Sally Anne Morgan – Cups
One half of experimental Appalachian duo House And Land, Morgan has created a solo album full of beautiful, challenging instrumental pieces. Expanding her palette to include guitars, banjos, a xylophone, and musical frogs alongside her fiddle has enabled her to produce impressionistic, often open-ended compositions full of absorbing drones and sudden, unexpected sparkles.
Sarah Louise – Earth Bow
The other half of experimental Appalachian duo House And Land, Sarah Louise, has been astoundingly prolific in recent years, but Earth Bow is one of her best. A highly accomplished guitarist, her music has an ecologically aware slant that makes it feel important, even urgent. This, combined with the subtle introduction of electronics, provides Earthbow’s tension: it is meditative but pertinent, protest music imbued with the spirit of Hiroshi Yoshimura’s environmental ambience.
Devin Hoff – Voices From The Empty Moor
Double bassist extraordinaire Hoff called in a whole bunch of favours to create this lovingly-assembled collection of Anne Briggs favourites. Shannon Lay, Julia Holter, Sharon Van Etten and Cairo Club’s Emmett Kelly all have vocal slots, while saxophonist Howard Wiley provides a blistering improvisational take on Maa Bonny Lad and Jim White adds his ever-impressive drumming to Willie O’ Winsbury. Hoff’s playing holds it all together, and the whole thing feels remarkably coherent. If this is a tribute album, it’s about as original and ambitious as it’s possible for a tribute album to be.
Arab Strap – As Days Get Dark
The first Arab Strap album in sixteen years is an absolute belter. A taut, hilarious, sad picture of contemporary Britain that offers up the merest hints of redemption only to snatch them away at the last moment. Aidan Moffat’s grim, brilliantly observed vignettes prove as vivid and visceral as ever, while Malcolm Middleton goes from post-rock to pastoral via slow-core with practised ease, adding itchy rhythms and industrial, mechanised beats. The duo’s real magic is their ability to build up these disparate character studies – individual, private apocalypses – into a bigger picture of moral decay and human fragility.
Alasdair Roberts og Völvur – The Old Fabled River
It wouldn’t be an end of year list without Alasdair Roberts on it. This one is a bit different though. A collaboration with Norwegian folk collective Völvur, it showcases some of Roberts’s best songwriting for a while (the tender and melodic Orison Of Unison and the cosmological manifesto The Green Chapel are highlights) and also allows his band to casually cook up some of the most riveting experimental folk music you’re likely to hear. Marthe Lea’s saxophone is a particular highlight, as is her singing on two of the traditional Norwegian pieces.
Richard Dawson and Circle – Henki
I didn’t think when 2021 began, that one of my favourite releases of the year would be a folk-metal concept album about plants, but such is Richard Dawson’s unparalleled songwriting talent that he seems able to delve into any genre he chooses and come out with an absolute treasure. Finnish experimental metallers Circle provide the perfect foil, alternating between driving guitars, eerie soundscapes and pagan folk. And, of course, the songs abound in Dawson’s trademark erudition, detail and wit.