Mike Davies

Norwich-based nine-piece The Vagaband return this month with a new album – Something Wicked This Way Comes. While there’s a mass of fine influences at play beneath the surface, their feet are planted firmly in British roots rock soil. Wickedly good.

For his seventh album, Thousand Springs, East Nashvillian Korby Lenker decided to skip the studio altogether and head to his home state of Idaho to record in places that held particular meaning for him. It’s all the richer for it.

Over the years, Leger’s been gradually establishing himself as a figure of note in the Canadian music scene, this album finds him ready to take on far wider horizons.

Winner of International Artist of the Year at the 2018 UK Americana Awards, Courtney Marie Andrews’ follow up to ‘Honest Life’ has arrived with high expectations. From the opening of ‘May Your Kindness Remain’, there’s no doubt that expectations have not only been met but also surpassed.

Majestic Halls oozes warm, honeyed southern soul and a gospel vibe that will inevitably draw comparisons to Van Morrison but there are other more country and bluesier colours to its palette, Robins wielding his brush with the mastery of a Van Gogh as he paints his musical canvas.

The Orphan King is Ed Romanoff’s belated follow-up to his self-titled 2012 debut, he’s linked with Simone Felice as producer who also provides the drums alongside an impressive roster of musicians.

John Forrester may not have the wider recognition as some of his peers and contemporaries, but, as this insightful and open album proves, he’s no less a talent.

Lord of the Desert is 3hattrio’s most adventurous and eclectic work yet, “pure peyote delirium enveloped in a haze of banjo, guitar, bass, fiddle lines and bass drum dancing around like the indigenous desert animal spirits”…long may they reign.

On Gem Andrews latest album she uses dark country to tackle themes of mental illness, poverty, community and destitution. A strong album – this is a  magnetic North, indeed.

Probably not something you’d fish out to put you in the party mood, but as a soundtrack to a good wallow in self-hatred, post-millennial despair and emotional squalor, this is down in the gutter with the best.

Widdershins is a potent work in response to a moment in time, when, whether it’s clockwise or anti, there seems to be, as Dylan put it, no direction home that is a road rather than a minefield.

The new Low Anthem album requires you take the time to fully listen and absorb, but like immersion in brine baths, the results have an unexpectedly relaxing and calming effect.