You can read all our latest end-of-year lists here. We still have some more Top 10 lists to share along with the 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 Thomas Blake’s Top 10…
Maxine Funke – Pieces of Driftwood
Funke mixes apparently simple but often breathtakingly poetic songwriting with an idiosyncratic, sometimes experimental approach to the guitar; her songs insinuate themselves into your head and into your life with the minimum of fuss. Pieces of Driftwood is a quietly remarkable collection of non-album tracks gleaned from the last ten years of consistently high-quality output. It hangs together brilliantly as an album in its own right and acts as the perfect primer for one of New Zealand’s finest songwriters.
Big Thief – Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You
This might just go down as Big Thief’s masterpiece. There’s not a dull moment in any of its twenty tracks. Buck Meek is beginning to cement his reputation as one of his generation’s great guitarists, the rhythm section is on point throughout, and Adrianne Lenker’s writing is at its best. She can be goofy and deadly serious in the same heartbeat. She examines self-love, the nature of time, environmental concerns and garlic bread – and that’s just in one song. I know people who have been saying Big Thief are the best band in the world for a while; they might just have a point.
Richard Dawson – The Ruby Cord
From one of the best bands in the world to one of the great solo singer-songwriters. Richard Dawson introduced The Ruby Cord (the final album in a trilogy that includes Peasant and 2020) 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.
Dana Gavanski – When It Comes
The songs on Dana Gavanski’s new album feel precarious, precious, almost as if they are on the verge of being lost forever. But they also display a new-found strength and confidence. This atmosphere may stem from the very real problems Gavanski experienced with temporary voicelessness, but it makes for a uniquely haunting set of songs, channelling early Nico, Julia Holter and Laetitia Sadier.
Burd Ellen – A Tarot of the Green Wood
Yet another exquisitely haunted selection of drone-heavy takes on traditional folk songs (plus a wonderful Alasdair Roberts cover). The cosmogonic weirdness that lies at the heart of much folk music is on full show here, on an album that experimentation and modern compositional techniques can shine a new light on tradition.
The Shovel Dance Collective – The Water is the Shovel of the Shore
Another uncompromisingly experimental release, marrying folk song with field recordings and telling the story of the River Thames and its environs through sound and music. It’s incredibly ambitious, massively wide-ranging and, at times, chillingly beautiful. Threads of sound weave in and out, brusque interruptions become vivid interludes, and the river’s many voices overlay each other in a complex matrix of music and social history. The whole thing is a confluence of art forms, challenging the way we listen to music and to the world.
Bill Callahan – YTI⅃AƎЯ
Another year, another excellent Callahan release. He’s been doing this for thirty-something years now and shows no sign of stopping. Every new Callahan album seems like a new mini-era, and this is no exception. This one has a sense of catharsis to it and of coming to terms with events beyond your control. At least one of the songs deals with the death of friend and former label-mate David Berman. It is, in part, hopeful. It is very much of the moment. And it’s also one of his most varied, musically interesting releases in a while.
Jacken Elswyth – Six Static Scenes
It’s been a great year for experimental folk music. Jacken Elswyth (who also happens to be in the Shovel Dance Collective) has released an album that redefines the complex relationships between musician, instrument, composition and adaptation. Her banjo pieces grow out of tiny errors, discrepancies and idiosyncrasies of older arrangements and are filtered through the musical language of contemporary composition, abstraction and improvisation. The results are disarmingly personal – in extracting the minutiae of a song, Elswyth makes it her own.
One Leg One Eye – …And Take the Black Worm With Me
Heavy, epic post-folk, cathartic and dense, arriving on massive platforms of drone. Ian Lynch from Lankum takes the experimental urges hinted at in his day job to extremes. It’s sometimes difficult but always powerful.
Angeline Morrison – The Brown Girl and Other Folk Songs
Morrison has been vocal about black representation in folk music – her album The Sorrow Songs, also released this year, deals with this explicitly. The Brown Girl is a perfectly pitched collection of traditional songs whose perspectives are subtly different from what many of us might be used to, aligning folk music’s propensity to ‘otherness’ with black experience. It is also achingly beautiful, sad and haunting.