100 – 75 | 74 – 50 | 49-25 | 24-01 |
24-01
24. Burd Ellen – A Tarot Of The Green Wood
Something about Burd Ellen’s eerie take on drone-heavy, experimental folk is uniquely suited to the crepuscular nooks of the year, the times of seasonal change when the cast of a landscape changes almost imperceptibly or the quality of light shifts ever so slightly. There are countless different tarot decks in existence, and each has its own mythology, its own way of being interpreted or resisting interpretation, so much so that divination could be described as a form of artistic expression, one with deep historical roots and complex layers of meaning. A Tarot Of The Green Wood adds to that artistic tradition in a unique way, exploring shared archetypal imagery in a successful attempt to tread entirely new ground. It is a suitably bewitching, disconcerting and often profoundly moving experience from the most innovative duo in folk music.
23. Pharis & Jason Romero – Tell ‘Em You Were Gold
In a relatively short time, they’ve scooped three Juno Awards (for Traditional Roots Album in 2016, 2019, and 2021), as well as seven Canadian Folk Music Awards, and earned increasing international acclaim with each successive album release. It seems odds-on that Tell ‘Em You Were Gold will extend this highly successful streak, further reinforcing their position within the upper echelons of the global folk music community.
22. Mali Obomsawin – Sweet Tooth
“As well as being a clarion call and a beacon of defiance, Mali Obomsawin’s ‘Sweet Tooth’ is one of those albums that utterly defy expectation or convention – it occupies its own universe, arriving from leftfield to blow your mind.” It’s also a release that opened a whole can of worms for me to express myself politically alongside an assessment of its powerful sonics; I’ve never penned a longer review for any album than I did for this extraordinary record. Not only is it an exhibition of dazzlingly composed and performed, deep, spiritual jazz, but from cultural and historical perspectives, it arrived at a point in time to mark it as something of a zeitgeist work of art. Think of it as commensurate with Max Roach’s We Insist! Freedom Now Suite.
21. Richard Dawson – The Ruby Cord
Take either of Richard Dawson’s previous two solo albums and examine them in isolation, and you could make a case for him being our greatest living songwriter. Peasant (2017) examined the lives of a diverse but linked set of characters in Anglo-Saxon Britain, while 2020 (2019) saw Dawson cast his eye over contemporary issues ranging from racism to parenthood via social anxiety, climate change, poor working conditions and football. Richard Dawson introduced The Ruby Cord (the final album in this trilogy) with a 41-minute lead single whose lyrics read like post-apocalyptic modernist poetry. His breadth of reference is huge, as is his vocabulary, but it never feels overly recondite, thanks in part to the warmth of the music and the ease of the delivery. Dawson is a true one-off, and this is his strangest, most beautiful work to date.
20. Jeb Loy Nichols – The United States Of The Broken Hearted
Speaking of his new album The United States Of The Broken Hearted, created in the singer-songwriter vein with acclaimed Dub-master producer Adrian Sherwood, Jeb Loy Nichols says it “has been forty years in the making.” That time frame is primarily down to the longevity of his friendship with Sherwood, not to mention the hours upon hours they spent together listening to and talking about their musical discoveries. As you would expect, this was a supremely eclectic journey that pulled in all genres, be it Jazz, Blues, Psych, Soul, Reggae or Country. This album is ultimately a soother; despite the troubles reflected in much of the subject matter, this singer never loses sight of the restorative beauty in music and hope found in basic person-to-person interaction…these are things which still make life worth living.
19. The Wave Pictures – When The Purple Emperor Spreads His Wings
Indie stalwarts The Wave Pictures have always been about more than the sum of their parts. On paper, they’re a classic three-piece – Dave Tattersall on guitar and vocals, Franic Rozycki on bass and Jonny ‘Huddersfield’ Helm behind the drum kit – but the reality is something more complex and much more interesting. Tattersall has always been a brilliant and singular lyricist…The cycle of life and the cycle of death are one and the same. That this album manages to get this message across consistently over twenty songs and in twenty different ways gives some idea of just how good a songwriter Dave Tattersall is. These songs are funny, sad, hopeful and mordant, and they are always melodically satisfying and musically accomplished. More than twenty albums into their career, The Wave Pictures are producing their best and most stylistically varied work.
18. Damien Jurado – Reggae Film Star
Reggae Film Star is an album that owes much of its thematic muscle to the cinema. Here is a group of songs that exist somewhere between dream and celluloid, songs whose images appear as if filtered through the gauze of nostalgia or subtly modified by the gaze of a silent audience. …it is not an album that provides easy answers, but despite its cryptic nature, it never feels dense beyond interpretation, and that is thanks to Jurado’s entrancing way with words. You feel he is unspooling a set of clues before your eyes that a new truth might reveal itself at every turn. It’s an addictive listen, full of faded beauty and lit by distant hope.
17. Daniel Bachman – Lonesome Weary Blues
This is the second Bachman album to feature in our Top 100, this one arriving on the cusp of a new year. For Lonesome Weary Blues, a mini-album of covers and traditional tunes, Daniel’s acoustic is again the star of the show. He plays the songs respectfully and with obvious love and care across the set; the music sounds joyous, and the picking is as confident and precise as you would expect from Daniel. …a beautifully balanced, unpretentious and life-affirming album from this ever-creative musician.
16. Jon Boden, Seth Lakeman, Ben Nicholls, Emily Portman, Jack Rutter – Sea Song Sessions
Given Britain’s position as an island nation, it should not be surprising that music and song related to the sea feature prominently in its social and political history. This latest nautically themed collection, released on Topic Records and produced and mixed by Ben Hillier (Blur, Doves, Elbow, Magic Numbers, Nadine Shah) at his Agricultural Audio studio “of incredibly rustic proportions, built out of straw, in the middle of a field” just north of Lewes over two days in May of 2022, features a collaboration between five stellar figures in the contemporary folk world, Jon Boden, Seth Lakeman, Ben Nicholls, Emily Portman and Jack Rutter. It’s a glorious album which showcases some of the best of the current crop of British folk artists delivering some of the best music you’re likely to hear this year.
15. Marisa Anderson – Still, Here
Marisa once said that her music’s tempo follows the pace of footsteps (herself being a life-long walker) or the beating of a heart. Still, Here feels very much alive; while being patient and considered throughout, it feels like a big and important album in this inimitable player’s career and fits a range of moods and emotions into its modest eight tracks and thirty-four minutes. Like the closing song Beat the Drum Slowly neatly demonstrates, there is drama and darkness here, but also optimism. The overall impression is that of a powerful and thought-provoking album of beauty and profundity.
14. Leyla McCalla – Breaking The Thermometer
Haitian-American musician Leyla McCalla’s latest album is a tribute to Jean Dominique, the owner of Radio Haiti, the nation’s only Creole-language radio station, and his wife and fellow journalist Michéle Montas and an impassioned defence of democracy in present-day Haiti. In McCalla’s hands, these songs – a combination of original and traditional material – also become a kind of quest towards personal understanding, an attempt to claim a heritage from a political administration that would seek to deny that heritage. Breaking The Thermometer is part of a larger project that includes a theatrical release and was commissioned by Duke University in North Carolina, but at no point does it feel either incomplete or overly academic. It is an extremely intelligent album, but it is also a warm, hopeful, angry, questioning one.
13. Sharron Kraus – KIN
KIN is the essence of Sharron Kraus. Her first album since 2018’s Joy’s Reflection is Sorrow; it is, in many respects, a continuation of that superb record. Joy’s Reflection dealt with the weighty themes of bereavement and emotional healing in a refreshingly open manner, an unusual achievement for an artist working in the often obscure psych-folk vernacular…at its heart, it was strikingly human and all the more beautiful for it. If KIN is in some ways a sequel, it is one born out of a changed world. Psych folk has long provided an outlet for strange flights of fancy, and Kraus is as accomplished as anyone else in that respect, but here she also mines the genre’s ability to deal with more consequential concerns. Impressively, she has managed to knit the two threads – seriousness and strangeness – together into one of the most rewarding, accomplished, and unexpectedly moving albums of the year.
12. Sun Ra Arkestra – Living Sky
Sun Ra first boarded the Arkestra in the fifties, and it remained the vessel for his pioneering, explorative space trips in Jazz music up to his death in 1993. From there on in, the collective continued with long-time members John Gilmore and then, including this current release, Marshall Allen at the helm. They were able to do this because for decades the Arkestra evolved into an ever-changing, living, breathing rocket ship of a unit, one of very few in music history that could be described as truly eclectic and in a constant state of evolution. This all grew from the Jazz approach of Sun Ra himself, who could shape a sound that had echoes of Traditional Jazz, New Orleans, Classical Progressions, free Modal experimentation, Electronic fusion and the most far-out Space-Electro beyond the realms of your imagination; to add another dimension they often presented themselves dressed in futuristic attire also. That the Sun Ra Arkestra have been an impenetrable, radical, impossible-to-pin-down project is an understatement and consequently, to the casual observer, saddled them with a reputation for difficult, complex music. Give them time and attention however and nothing could be further from the truth. Often lost among the overwhelming onslaught of visuals, interlocking music styles, and innovation is that the Arkestra have on many occasions produced some of the most beautiful Jazz music of our lifetimes and that mode of Arkestra is at the forefront on ‘Living Sky.’ It is an album so sublime that the intricacies and delicacies of the many layers of detail slowly unfold and shower the listener in pure interplanetary wonder. A sensational piece of work, the Sun Ra Arkestra sail ever onward into the stars and beyond.
11. The Unthanks – Sorrows Away
If Rachael and Becky Unthank are the heart of The Unthanks, then Adrian McNally is like the vessels, the veins and arteries down which the music flows to the limits of its creation. At the same time, Niopha Keegan, Chris Price, Lizzie Jones and the others who make up the band put the flesh on the bones. What’s most remarkable, though, is that they somehow manage to reinvent themselves on each album. Sorrows Away not only marks a welcome return but also brings one of their most extraordinary albums to date – a tonic to lift the spirits from one of the greatest folk bands in the UK today.
10. Kevin Morby – This Is a Photograph
Photographs capture moments that time cannot erase, except the images don’t tell the whole story, which Kevin Morby makes clear on ‘This Is a Photograph’. More than moments trapped in time, we get memories, fables and images captured by a lens focused on who we are and from where we have come. While you can see certain details, others need to be filled in. Morby takes to the task with a sense of awareness heightened by his father’s near-fatal heart attack. He finds the passion and emotion that make us living and breathing people, tingeing that with realities that humanise us all.
9. Joan Shelley – The Spur
The opening lines of Joan Shelley’s new album The Spur set the stage for everything that comes after. “Am I losing my mind?/ Do I see you there too?” If the past two years have done anything, it’s led us to question everything. Confined, yet in the midst of it, Shelley seemed to find a way to be contented as she prepared for the birth of a child with her husband and guitarist, Nathan Salsburg. There was a growing appreciation for what they did have, “High as the clouds/ When we named them our mountains/ My eyes squint to see them/ To trace their ridge lines.” Played out over the sounds of a steel resonator guitar, bass and droning keyboards, “Forever Blues” is pregnant with possibilities, amidst a refrain that makes her intentions clear, “I’m with you.” Times are what we make them and Joan Shelley has used her time to create something truly special with “The Spur.” It isn’t merely a window into a woman, it is a mirror that allows us to see the world differently, to view these moments not only as what they are but as moments rife with possibility.
8. Andrew Tuttle – Fleeting Adventure
Painting with colours few have considered for the banjo, Andrew Tuttle has again illustrated that the only thing constraining music for the banjo is our own sense of what is considered acceptable. Breaking down the barriers, Tuttle explores what it means to be a banjo player in the 21st century. While it may be conceived of as a Fleeting Adventure, the work of Andrew Tuttle is rapidly exploring alternate dimensions in the art and craft of the banjo as an instrument.
7. The Watersons – Frost and Fire
Some, possibly only a few, albums unquestionably warrant being designated either genre-defining and/or so important that they changed music, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band by The Beatles, Paranoid by Black Sabbath, King Of the Delta Blues Singers from Robert Johnson immediately spring to mind, whilst others are merely pretenders to the throne. For those who are unaware of the album, Frost And Fire: A Calendar of Ritual and Magical Songs sits firmly within the former category. One of the easiest reviews ever to write. Frost And Fire remains a revelatory and seminal album and this latest vinyl edition is an essential purchase.
6. Bonny Light Horseman – Rolling Golden Holy
It’s rare to find three confederates more musically matched than the members of Bonny Light Horseman, and their new album, Rolling Golden Holy, is a collaboration unlike any you’re likely to hear this year. There are even fewer rules than they had on their first disc. In the process, they’ve made something even more memorable because they take even more chances. Anais Mitchell, Eric D. Johnson and Josh Kaufman all sing, creating blends that reflect three individuals who have merged their identities in search of a common dream – to create the best music possible.
5. Jake Blount – The New Faith
The New Faith, a follow-up to the musician, scholar and activist Jake Blount’s 2020’s breakthrough debut, Spider Tales, is an impressive and timely recording – effortlessly and evocatively, re-interpreting traditional songs with a keen ear for more contemporary voices and sounds. At its heart is a consideration of the impact of climate change, spirituality and race. Despite the seriousness of the subject matter and the potential hopelessness of the narrative, The New Faith is an album rich with themes of hope, resilience and salvation. With a keen sense of tradition, Blount has cleverly delivered a bold, thought-provoking and judicious album, but one which is also a thoroughly, staggeringly thrilling listen. Glorious.
4. Bill Callahan – YTI⅃AƎЯ
Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest felt like a hugely important album in the Bill Callahan catalogue in that it signalled a return to music and songwriting that wasn’t always guaranteed; there was a point after the birth of his son where Bill couldn’t see a way back in. Shepherd was a wonder in many ways, a big twenty-song intimate epic that wasn’t afraid to let its acoustic music sprawl and let loose. In comparison, 2020’s Gold Record felt brief, minimalist and tightly focused, allowing its power to be realised slowly, with each vignette burrowing into the senses and staying put. To me, both are masterpieces, and YTI⅃AƎЯ feels like a natural follow-on and another step into this particular chapter of Bill’s career. Not everything is as it seems on this record; it will surprise, challenge and delight you, but the overwhelming feeling is one of allowing the senses to open and let life flow in. In short, another masterpiece from Bill Callahan.
3. Big Thief – Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You
When did Big Thief become magical? Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You quite simply is the sound of a band that’s discovered the chemistry that turns four into one. Wherever they decide to go, they seem to unearth the connective tissue that transforms their songs. Over the course of 20 tunes (whittled down from 45), they weave a tapestry of sound that incorporates elements from so many different styles with an audaciousness that simply escapes most bands. Recorded over a space of five months at four different record studios in the US, Adrianne Lenker, Buck Meek, Max Oleartchik, and James Krivchenia have crafted a set of tunes that, despite their stylistic differences, somehow manage to hang together and form an unusual and compelling collection that goes everywhere with the most impressive results.
2. Jake Xerxes Fussell – Good and Green Again
The list of personnel for Jake Xerxes Fussell‘s fourth album is fuller than previous ones but Good and Green Again is possibly the most spacious of his yet, with James Elkington‘s production keen to keep the sound light and focused. Jake’s use of the acoustic guitar instead of his old Telecaster on more tracks than usual also adds to this feel, which is present from the start….another spell-binding album from the inimitable Jake Xerxes Fussell.
1. Angeline Morrison – The Sorrow Songs: Folk Songs Of Black British Experience
Angeline Morrison‘s ‘The Sorrow Songs’ has generated a tremendous amount of interest since the announcement of its release on Topic Records, with it being hailed as one of the most significant and most anticipated releases of 2022. The obvious question of whether The Sorrow Songs: Folk Songs Of Black British Experience meets these expectations is a resounding and unqualified yes. It would not be facile to suggest that the album will be viewed as an important, landmark release in the canon of British folk music.
In an earlier interview with Folk Radio UK (read it here), Angeline told how she wanted the stories of historic British Black ancestors retold through song. She adds, “…telling stories through song is common to all cultures and the people whose stories are made into songs are those we remember”. The Sorrow Songs tell those stories so well, and they are now there for future generations to be remembered.
The Sorrow Songs is a ground-breaking album; the music is excellent throughout, beautifully enhanced by the album’s exemplary artwork and packaging. The additional notes are not only informative and enjoyable to read, but they also encourage you to explore this history further.
As a gift to the folk community, The Sorrow Songs will connect with the hearts and emotions of the listeners; as a gift to her ancestors, Angeline has more than done them proud.