Bob Fish

At every turn, Big Thief exposes their willingness to experiment and create sounds that puts them in a category all their own. Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You is a stunning new collection that goes everywhere with the most impressive results.

It’s as if Sam Weber didn’t so much construct Get Free as deconstruct it. In the process, he has made it an almost perfect collection of folk music that seems to play against all the rules. Which is what makes it an album worth hearing.

Drawing on personal grief and hope, on Metal Bird, Eve Adams exposes the flaws that have followed her around and creates a new world that exists in the “blur between fact and fiction”.

Good Morning Bedlam specialise in a highly appealing form of controlled chaos, merging touching and tender passages with jittery jive that can sound like a speed freak on a bender. Lulu is as good as anything you’re likely to hear this year or any year.

These two discs will cause a lot of head-scratching as people try to figure out why they’ve missed the glories of Fruit Bats. For those that haven’t, there’s also plenty of delights in store.

Jana Horn creates the aural equivalent of what a novelist writes, exposing the flaws and the heartbreak that reside in each of us. Optimism may be the answer, but there are going to be a lot of mysteries along the way.

A teacher by day, Ben McElroy seems to be mastering his own set of lessons on How I Learnt to Disengage from the Pack. Reengaging with the old, he has created something truly unique.

On Dodging Dues, the latest offering from Garcia Peoples, nothing is exactly what it seems. It is an album quite unlike anything else you’ll hear this year, an example of a band that is consistently trying to find the next doorway to the stars.

Paring things down to their essence, what Michael Hurley does on Time of the Foxgloves is establish that the truth is where you find it. Hurley’s brand of truth should never go out of fashion; it is timeless.

Bob Fish shares his Top 10 Albums of 2021 including Trippers & Askers, Heisk, Crys Matthews, Spencer Cullum, Jimbo Mathus and Andrew Bird, The Weather Station, Devin Hoff, Fruit Bats and Steve Gunn.

You won’t find a Christmas bell anywhere on Hiss Golden Messenger’s O Come All Ye Faithful. The songs are both reflective and surprising, fitting the season and highlighting the way forward towards the spring and a new year.

Aisha Badru doesn’t teach and doesn’t preach, she simply sings her truths. That we can learn from the lessons of “The Way Back Home” only serves to make her messages that much more important.