The year has been a positive cornucopia of outstanding albums, debuts or otherwise, challenging for a place in the annual best-of list. However, after some serious musical soul searching and reimmersions in the sound system, these, in alphabetical order, led the field for me.
Click on the title for the full review.
A Winter Union – Sooner After Solstice: A Transatlantic Folk Christmas
Unless you’re Phil Spector, Christmas albums don’t usually loom large in seasonal best-ofs, but their first in seven years, Gilmore & Roberts, Hannah Sanders, Ben Savage and Jade Rhiannon decorated the tree with a collection of irresistible baubles, both contemporary, aged and original, ranging from a posthumous pizzicato Wordsworth co-write to an African American Reconstruction era spiritual by way of brand new wassail and the mandolin and dobro original White Christmas Somewhere, topped off with the shining star that is their version of Townes Van Zandt’s Snowin’ On Raton. An album even Scrooge would have adored.
Bella Gaffney – Reflections
Coming together over three years and two lockdowns, with songs variously addressing climate change, separation and reflections on getting older and dreams left behind, joined by Holly Brandon fiddle, this embraced English folk, rootsy Americana, African folk-pop and even jazz colours on both traditional and self-penned numbers. Balancing an Appalachian-toned Fair And Tender Ladies against a setting of Walter Scott’s paean to Lindisfarne with Estonian bagpipes topped off with a blistering live Gallows Pole, it confirmed her status as one of this country’s finest folk stars.
Ian David Green – Songs To The Dust
The final in his ‘Songs’ albums found the Liverpudlian musing on mortality with musical touchstones that ranged from Cohen to Peter Sarstedt and subjects that variously embraced the war in Ukraine, doomed love, seeking connection and the true story of the motiveless murder of a young Jewish boy in Brooklyn. With mandolin and fiddle complementing piano and acoustic guitar, warm echoes of Ronnie Lane on Your Love Was Too Big For That Sky and a message about following your dreams inspired by a failed Elvis impersonator singing in a shopping mall, this wound up the trilogy in stupendous style.
The Lilac Time – Dance Till All The Stars Come Down
A true national treasure, fronted by Stephen Duffy, the trio is unrivalled in their country-folk-inflected English pastoral pop where the touchtone is Cat Stevens rather than Nick Drake, though Guthrie also gets a tip of the hat. A bucolic cocktail of quiet protest and gentle love songs, limned with nostalgia and traced with acoustic guitar and pedal steel, it deservedly featured in the upper reaches of the Folk Top 10, opening with the line “I’ve never liked my birthdays/They always make me sad” and ending with The Band That Nobody Knew a glorious tribute to all those who never quite made it, like the title this is a stellar album.
Reg Meuross – Stolen From God
A song cycle addressing this country’s complicity in the transatlantic slave trade, especially that of his home county in the South West of England and particularly the involvement of such feted figures as Francis Drake and Bristol entrepreneur Edward Colston whose philanthropy was offset by his involvement in the forcible transportation of some eight thousand Africans. Working in collaboration with Jali Fily Cisshokho, Roy Dodds and Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne, who sings lead on one of the tracks, with instrumentation that includes kora and fluegelhorn it’s not only a folk album in the very finest sense and tradition, but his personal masterpiece and arguably the most important album of the year.
Mouths Of Babes – World Brand New
Relative newcomers, this was the second album by the queer California personal and professional Americana duo of Tylan Greenstein and Ingrid Elizabeth, an album about surviving tempestuous times and finding renewal, the arrangements flavoured with dobro, trumpet, pedal steel, cello and even tubular bells with fiddle courtesy of Tania from The Avett Brothers. Mingling melancholy and jubilation in its deft fingerpicking and glorious harmonies, it hits an anthemic note on the state of the nation My Country and includes a spellbinding gospel-infused cover of Holly Near’s I Am Willing; they were one of my discovery highlights of the year.
Roseanne Reid – Lawside
Clearly inheriting the musical DNA of Proclaimer’s father Craig and titled for the Dundee district where she, her wife and young son live, Reid’s second album trades in aching harmonies and Americana influences with banjo and accordion, adding their musical colours. Shine On offered a poignant tribute to Caroline Flack and a call to not surrender to the darkness while What Constitutes A Sin deserves a free pass to the country Hall Of Fame. She’s already been enthusiastically endorsed by Steve Earle, who clearly knows a risings tar when he hears on.
Rod Picott – The Starlight Tour
Musically and emotionally uncompromisingly raw, Picott’s 14th album turns the mirror inward for contemplations of mortality and paths not taken, his dusty, throaty rasp on fine form as he sings of the blue-collar hardscrabble life, television evangelist grifters and, on the stunning A Puncher’s Chance, finding the strength to go one last round. One of America’s finest storyteller lyricists, as exemplified in the way a clapped-out farm combine harvester becomes the only thing saving a man from crushing defeat, the Amy Speace co-write Homecoming Queen about dreams that never came true and the Guy Clark-styled title track’s dark foundation in how, during winter, Saskatoon police reputedly dumped indigenous drunks outside of town to die from exposure. He personally rates it as one of the three best albums he’s ever made. I defy anyone to argue otherwise.
Viv & Riley – Imaginary People
Appalachian duo Vivian Leva and Riley Calcagno ditched their surnames for their sophomore album, but not their affection for jangly and infectious retro folksy pop laden with catchy choruses, earworm hooks and their twin nasal whines. With songs veined with honest emotion and playful whimsy about both appreciating the past from where they came and looking to the future ahead, about the places they’ve lived and reflections on identity, it’s a musically and emotionally complex progression from their 2021 debut, repeating its claim to be among the year’s best.
Dan Whitehouse – Reflections On The Glass Age (Acoustic)
Another repeat Top 10 inclusion, Whitehouse made the list last year with an album of exactly the same songs, his musings on the way social media and screens have changed the way we communicate and connect. This year, he revisited that but from a rerecorded acoustic perspective, paring them down to their core to expose the melancholia at their heart and creating a completely different listening experience with an album to immerse in as the day fades away and the silence of your thoughts and heartbeat fill your head. Utterly beguiling.
Editor’s note: This is the first of several top 10 lists from our core review team. There will also be a Top 100 Albums list and other end-of-year lists. Click here to see the latest lists.