Alex Neilson

With “Everything in Readiness”, Shovel Dance Collective have combined vision and virtuosity, intuitive gristle and scholastic rigour to create the best folk album of the year. This is folk music in its most potent form. By allowing itself to be hybridised and mongrelised by other influences, they are getting closer to what’s most vital and true about the form.

Powtes’ “Destroying A Living” is a sonic monument to the common folk dispossessed when the Fens were drained. A six-piece band helmed by Gus Beamish, they bring the ecstasy of group improvisation to the austerity of the drone. It sounds as if they’re all performing live in the same room, responding to the warp and weft of their collective humanity.

Oren Ambarchi’s “Cooked” is two side-length pieces of mysterious beauty in which he goes further through the looking glass. This is ensemble improvisation at its most accomplished, with an international cast of master abstractors. In Drag City, Ambarchi has found a larger platform to bring his mutant blues to the masses. This is a public service which should be applauded because, 100-plus releases in, he’s rarely sounded better.

Kahil El’Zabar’s “Sketches For Trane” is an astonishing suite in tribute to John Coltrane, released for the centenary of his birth. At 72, the Chicago drummer has gone back to the future to propagate Coltrane’s message of expanded human potential to a new generation of listeners. Alex Neilson calls it one of the best albums he has reviewed for KLOF.

The Owl Service’s “Tied to the Land” is their first album in a decade, a lineup change bringing Dorothy Chappell and Rebecca Lievers alongside bandleader Steven Collins for a joyous rendering of traditional songs, instrumentals and an adaptation of a Cornish folk tale. It’s a potent brew that supercharges the album’s 10-year-overnight success.

Jarrett Gilgore and Anthony Pirog’s “Between The Earth and Where” is a fine tributary to this great river of human achievement, compelling in its subtle warmth and discreet lyricism. Pirog’s guitar forms finely latticed patterns for Gilgore’s sensuous blowing; dreamy saxophone flutters and spirals at the edge of consciousness. Two empathetic and exploratory young men playing a delicate, nocturnal blues.

Falmouth’s Blind Yeo follow Cornwall’s tradition of wonky inventiveness on “The Lemoine Point,” which surges with baked, euphoric Krautrock riffs and pantheistic ancient worship. Founded by singer/guitarist Will Greenham, the loose collective is based out of The Cornish Bank, the Falmouth venue Greenham co-founded. Blind Yeo are doing more than most to keep Cornwall weird.

Baby Dee’s “Child of Joy” is her first album in 11 years, reworking songs from her catalogue for accordion. Where piano and harp once carried them, the accordion makes them preciously intimate and impossibly vast. Dee is the great chronicler of everyday miracles, written in alphabets of light — the eye of a poet, the hands of a carpenter.

“Donn Dubh” is a challenging and exhilarating reimagining of Scots Gaelic traditions by two fearless musical cosmonauts at the top of their game. Arun Sood and Angeline Morrison’s collaborative debut calls to mind Eno and Byrne’s “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts” — samples, distortion and elegiac piano channelling folk’s ancient past while forecasting its glittering future.

Captured live over a Valentine’s Day weekend in Los Angeles, Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s “Ghosts of American Psychonauts” finds familiar songs dismantled and rearranged by an expanded band. The great trapeze artist of the human experience has eviscerated and recapitulated his own songbook once more — a compelling addition to an ongoing project of self-actualisation.

Marvin Tate’s “Controlled Burn” is a hallucinogenic portal into a world that’s similar to ours, but the furniture is rearranged. Recorded as duo improvisations with longtime collaborator Leroy Bach, then remodelled and refined into the tightest 12 tracks, the method is brave, and the results speak of the angelic geometry of the universe within.

Ed Askew’s posthumous “The Final Painting” captures the fragile poignance of a great artist in the December of his years, giving one last shake of his feathers before exiting the stage. The album occupies a space between Bowie’s “Blackstar” and Cohen’s “You Want It Darker,” not raging against the dying of the light but dancing towards it with outstretched arms.

The Powers Ensemble share the mutant DNA of Will Oldham, “Astral Weeks” and Robbie Basho, and there’s a freshness to “Kindling” which is disarming but also makes your blood sing with recognition. Each song captures a communal rush of discovery — messy ecstasy achieved with flair and concision.

SILKess Demon’s “Life is Art, Art is Life” marks a departure into the folk-horror briar — visions of Britain’s native music suffused with dread and obscure ritual. One of the quiet victories of self-released, self-recorded, neurotic, folk-inflected artistry that helps make Britain bearable again.

Myer U Clark’s “Tinderbox” is astonishingly accomplished for a debut, recalling the late-’60s Canterbury scene of Kevin Ayers, Robert Wyatt and Caravan. There’s a clarity of vision, matched by adroit musicianship and a singular conception of songwriting — a formidable first album on Broadside Hacks.

On “Ten Signs”, Dan Haywood and Harvey Lord trade dizzyingly poetic lines across an album whose rhythm is particularly striking — both languorous and uptight. Spring birds twitter through the recordings; a casual charm runs throughout. Their guitar work is soulful and unpredictable, with instrumental breaks laddering between sections in a way that would have M.C. Escher shaking his head in baffled admiration.

Lavinia Blackwall’s “The Making” is her most fully-formed conception yet — frank, dynamic songwriting turbo-charged by Marco Rea’s production. Former Trembling Bells bandmate Alex Neilson travels to her home in the hills of Molise to interview his oldest friend about melody-first writing, escaping mediocre situations, and finding a sense of freedom in Italy and at her off-grid cabin in Carbeth.

Emmett Kelly, Stephen Malkmus, Matt Sweeney and Jim White have all done time in supergroups before. Could they handle it on a cold Tuesday night on a Bluetooth stereo in Glasgow? Alex Neilson gives an emphatic and unequivocal yes. Released in late 2024, “The Hard Quartet” carries all the messy, confounding joy of Dirty Three and Pavement, and makes you remember what you love about music.