Mike Davies

It’s often said that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and this album applies salve to the wound and sets about the healing. Just like the medical box of their name, every home should have one.

All On Red is the debut album from Orphan Colours (ft. members of ahab, Noah & the Whale and Danny & The Champions of The World). With a groundswell of acclaim and awareness already building, this could indeed be the start of something beautiful.

While not pushing any new musical frontiers, Tyler Childers does make familiar landscapes feel freshly tilled on these songs about the trials, tribulations and temptations of a hardscrabble working life.

Metatonia is Yvonne Lyon’s eighth album – a treat for both existing fans and new audiences alike, this really deserves to make her name and music much wider known.

An album that deserves to be showered with awards, a  testament to both the superb musicianship and songwriting skills of its assembled cast and the continuing relevance and durability of the world’s greatest playwright.

There’s nothing particularly musically fussy here, just the sound of two musicians in perfect synch doing what they do so well and, in the process, crafting what is sure to prove one of this year’s finest albums.

Medicine Songs is a dynamic, full-blooded reminder that, after 54 years of performing, the Canadian-born Cree singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie remains a voice that demands and needs to be heard.

Underscoring both her skill as a storyteller and her background as a musical ethnologist alongside her songwriting craft and understated, intimate and engaging vocals, if North Star was a coming of age, Carey’s third album marks her blossoming into a rich maturity.

Following on from 2015’s ‘Analogue Tales’, Birmingham’s James Summerfield returns for his sixth full-length release. ‘Doubt’ is arguably his most confident and wholly satisfying to date.

Mike Davies shares his top 10 albums of 2017 including The Young’uns whose album makes a solid claim to being the folk album of the year and Hannah Aldridge whose album he declares is “one of my platinum-plated favourites of the year.”

Almost four years since the release of their debut album, the Glasgow sextet, James Edwyn & The Borrowed Band, return with a solid and harder-edged set of guitar-driven alt-country.

Chris Stapleton’s ‘From A Room: Volume 1’ has just recently walked away with the CMA Best Album award. Based on the strength of Volume 2, they might as well start engraving that 2018 Album of the Year award now.