Mike Davies

Joined by Neilson Hubbard and Will Kimbrough, Dean Owens’s Pictures is an album haunted by ghosts and anchored by love, it might just well be the best he’s ever made.

Steeped in Blue-collar values, Americana singer-songwriter Ben Gage’s ‘Two Singing Songs’ is a welcome and fabulous first full-length studio release.

Intimate, stripped-back, folk Americana, the songs that make up Jeffrey Martin’s “Thank God We Left The Garden” are written with honesty, depth, wisdom, and insight.

Sad Lady Songs Vol 1 is further evidence of Amy Hollinrake’s burgeoning craft and growing reputation on the contemporary folk circuit. Vol 2 is eagerly anticipated.

An introspective journey through anxieties, fears, loss, need, loneliness and love; while Donland’s is not always the most uplifting of listens, it’s assuredly one of Jerry Leger’s finest works.

Grained with both aching and joy, ‘Behind Every Door’ is a heady, quietly intoxicating work that may well stand as Matt McGinn’s finest album to date.

Cormac O Caoimh’s ‘Where The World Begins’ covers themes of parenthood, autism and love. It’s a deeply personal and quite wonderful album.

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.