Mike Davies

While he’s long proven himself a master wordsmith, Louis de Bernières’ ‘Delicate Lies’ adds further fuel to the claim he’s a master musician too.

With Coyote, Dylan LeBlanc’s first self-produced album, he creates a Southern Gothic mood piece, a sparse, cinematic vision of an American dystopia, drawing on such antecedents as the writings of Cormac McCarthy.

Starlight Tour stands up there with Rod Picott’s best albums to date; if this is the first crop of him ploughing a new field of dreams, then future harvests should prove no less bountiful.

Providing thoughtful commentary on how the news is obtained and reported and a potted live Megson concert, “The Herald” album most certainly warrants getting some metaphorical ink on your fingers.

In the final moments of Ozarker, on which he pays homage to his Ozark roots in small-town Missouri, some of the songs drawing on his family history, Israel Nash sings, “I didn’t strike the match but I let it burn”. This album positively blazes.

The songs on See The Big Man Cry have been so well chosen and covered that should Robert Rex Waller Jr fancy flipping through his record collection for a third volume, it would be very welcome.

While Victoria Bailey may not be a widely known name, with her excellent playing and from-the-heart songs, A Cowgirl Rides On should go a long way to remedying that.

A decidedly ambitious project, P.J.M. Bond’s ‘In Our Time’ is based on the writings of Ernest Hemingway which has been glowingly acclaimed by a highly respected Hemingway scholar; it fully deserves to reap the same rewards from music critics and audiences too.

Songs to the Dust is a magnificent conclusion to Ian David Green’s outstanding and critically acclaimed trilogy, all of which deserve a pride of place in your collection.

On ‘We Will Never Be The Same’, the latest offering from the Canadian trio the Good Lovelies, they present a rather wonderful album about accepting the march of time but not giving in to it.

Ida Wenøe’s ‘Undersea’ is like musical Reiki for the soul, offering a view of life that, like the ocean, can be often filled with mystery and darkness, but “when the light hits its surface, it can be the most golden thing existing”. Immerse yourself.

‘World Brand New’, the new album from Mouths of Babes, is a ridiculously infectious collection of Americana and an outstanding album that flies the flag for compassion, understanding and change, which we’d all do well to salute.