You can read all our latest end-of-year lists here. We still have more Top 10 lists to share, along with our Top 100 Albums of 2022. Enjoy looking back; the album titles beneath all link to album reviews, and there is also an album purchase link (most of which link to Bandcamp).
Here is Mike Davies’s Top 10…
Mary Gauthier – Dark Enough To See The Stars
Taking its title from a Martin Luther King Speech, her first new music in four years reaffirms Gauthier as one of the finest songwriters in America, the focus more on the personal than the political as she pays tribute to those lost during the pandemic and celebrates what they left behind as well as reflecting on the contentment found after her years as an alcoholic and addict.
Emma Guzman – Something Less Than Alone
Her third album at just 19 and informed by her transition into queer adulthood, Guzman straddles indie-folk and Americana with striking imagery and songs that balance self-loathing and compassion for the outcasts and underdogs. The new Courtney Marie Andrews.
Garrett Heath – The Losing End
A mix of stripped-back acoustic and more fulsome instrumentation, at times sporting Band influences, this turns its focus on economically distressed small-town Rust Belt America where he grew up and the people he knows, a cover of John Hartford’s In Tall Buildings sitting alongside his piercing commentaries.
Janis Ian – The Light At The End Of The Line
She says it’s her final solo studio album, and if so, she ends on a high comparable to her classic Between The Lines with songs that defiantly celebrate her survival in the business, pay tribute to Nina Simone, recall jazz-tinted memories of moving to New York and offer light in the darkness. She even gets funky and embraces rap on a call to resist the misogynistic repression of women.
Memorial – Memorial
The debut album from the Bristol-based duo inevitably saw them tagged as a UK Simon & Garfunkel with their delicate balance of contrasting vocals, fragile folksy melodies and songs about unrequited love, alienation, loss and longing. Comparisons can be invidious, but I reckon Paul and Art would be honoured.
Angeline Morrison – Sorrow Songs: Folk Songs of Black British Experience
Possibly the year’s most important album, Morrison delivers a career-best collection of original songs that draw on real-life stories, events and experiences of a diaspora lacking a voice in the British folk tradition, addressing slavery, racism, and exploitation.
Alison O’Donnell – Hark The Voice That Sings For All
Now 70, Dubliner O’Donnell brings a new eye to old traditions with subjects ranging from cheating wives to famine ships and figures from Irish history, at times echoing the jazz-folk of Pentangle, at others, Irish folk, cabaret roots and even Balkan colours, her powerful vocals variously evoking Marianne Faithful, Norma Waterson, Nick Cave, Anne Briggs, and Shirley Collins.
Julian Taylor – Beyond The Reservoir
An album charting his transition from rebellious youth into adolescence and adulthood with attendant themes of identity, hope and redemption while addressing America’s dark history of slavery and cultural disenfranchisement, a particularly potent track being about the discovery of an unmarked mass grave of 215 indigenous children at an Indian Residential School.
Michael Weston King – The Struggle
His first solo work in over a decade, mining his folk and country roots and drawing on poignant and often painful personal experiences, notably a song about the death of his mother-in-law, alongside commentary on George Floyd and Trump America, reminding that he is one of the country’s finest songwriters.
Luke James Williams – Our Blood Is Red
Another of the year’s best debuts, hailing from Cambridgeshire, Williams has a sound and style evocative of Luke Jackson and a similar vein of social commentary to his lyrics mingled with songs of self-recrimination and broken relationships that are often laced with wry, dark humour. His blood is rich indeed.