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.
I’ve been making these end-of-year lists for a while now, and every year has presented me with a few harsh choices. Ten albums doesn’t seem like a lot, but it does force you to sharpen your mind, to listen again, perhaps to listen better. Ten albums down from a shortlist of twelve or fifteen genuine contenders, that’s the usual story. Ten good albums, and a couple more that it pains you to leave off the list. But this year, ten albums seems especially cruel, especially arbitrary. This year, there were more than ten albums that made me sit up, that made me think differently about music or about myself.
So there is a list of ten albums, and then there is another list, a shadow list, of music that somehow didn’t make the final ten but, on another day, might have done. This shadow list is, for the first time ever, significantly longer than the final top ten. It contains Julie Byrne’s critically acclaimed meditation on grief, The Greater Wings, Meg Baird’s masterful comeback, Furling, and Lankum’s brilliant, Mercury-nominated False Lankum. It contains works by old favourites like P.G. Six, Shirley Collins, David A. Jaycock, Emma Tricca and Daniel Bachman. It contains albums that are experimental, fun, and reverent by artists like You Are Wolf, Spencer Cullum, Ireke, and The Saxophones.
I’ll be listening to those albums for a long time. I wish my list could be bigger.
Milkweed – The Mound People
Milkweed make the kind of music that sounds like the accompaniment to a dream of ritual sacrifice or the awakening of something ancient and inscrutable. With little more than voice, banjo, guitar, and hissing loops of tape, they create mysterious relic-songs with roots in old-time Americana and DIY slacker folk. The Mound People is short, disconcerting and satisfying. Its songs are built on uncanny, half-remembered melodies that seem more like discoveries than acts of composition. They’re the most exciting thing in folk music right now.
Maxine Funke – River Said
New Zealand singer, guitarist and composer Maxine Funke’s latest album shows off every facet of her enviable talent. The first half is a set of breathtakingly beautiful, ostensibly simple acoustic songs in the tradition of Sibylle Baier or Vashti Bunyan. The second side features two long, experimental freeform pieces, indebted to ambient, experimental composition, jazz and musique concrete. Despite the half-time code-switch, the whole piece carries a dreamlike quality that seems to be part of Funke’s profound and unique musical identity.
Joanna Sternberg – I’ve Got Me
Sternberg is doing a great job of keeping the New York anti-folk thing going. While their second album nods in the direction of the Moldy Peaches and Jeffrey Lewis, the songs are very much their own: contemporary issues are explored in songs that sound like old standards or campfire hymns, and a whole range of musical heritage is gleefully encompassed, from Jewish music-hall to the soulful and sophisticated piano pop of Carole King, via Greenwich Village folk stylings. I’ve Got Me is full of honest self-examination and, ultimately, welcome positivity.
John Francis Flynn – Look Over The Wall, See The Sky
One of a whole raft of incredible records to come out of Dublin this year, Flynn’s second album is an object lesson in how to make traditional music sound vital. Angry, playful, noisy and tender by turn, it’s full of droning textures and carried by Flynn’s astonishing voice.
Lisa O’Neill – All of This is Chance
Another Dublin-based artist, another incredible voice. With her latest album, O’Neill cements her reputation as one of the most singular and thrilling talents in the world right now, in any form of music.
Bex Burch – There is Only Love and Fear
One of Chicago-based label International Anthem’s enviable roster of talent, Burch creates experimental, immersive compositions for the gyil, a West African gourd-resonated xylophone. Influenced by free improvisation, DIY minimalism, jazz and found sounds, her debut solo album is a unique treat.
Brìghde Chaimbeul – Carry Them With Us
Nobody else sounds anything like Chaimbeul. The smallpipes player and composer is still only in her mid-twenties, but it feels like she has occupied her own incomparable furrow for ever, bridging the gap between the lost sounds of the past and futuristic ambience. Here, she enlists the help of experimental sax giant Colin Stetson and creates an album that moves from stillness to bursts of dreamlike energy.
ØXN – CYRM
Radie Peat from Lankum has been busy this year. ØXN sees her join forces with fellow Dublin-based musicians Katie Kim, Eleanor Myler and John ‘Spud’ Murphy to unleash an uncompromising slab of wonderfully textured drone-folk, including breathtaking reworkings of folk standards and a terrifyingly brilliant cover of Scott Walker’s Farmer in the City.
Makushin – Move into the Luminous
Makushin channel the dreamy energy of Virginia Astley and the Cocteau Twins into painterly mini-epics, ambient soundscapes condensed into perfect vignettes. The trio’s combination of loose but jazzy musicianship, pop brevity and a folky inclusiveness is a rare but highly effective one.
The Furrow Collective – We Know by the Moon
The Furrow Collective have become one of the most reliable propositions on the traditional scene. They never seem to put a foot wrong, either with their choice of material or with their accomplished musical performances. But this doesn’t mean they’re predictable: there is a gentle but palpable sense of experimentation to everything they do, whether it’s a reworking of a song from Schubert’s Winterreise or Robert Burns poem given new life.