Mike Davies

Buford Pope’s Blue-eyed Boy is first class throughout. It may be three years since he recorded any actual new material, but if he’s  got any more like this in the archive, there’ll be no complaints if he decides to dust off a few more. 

Kim Lowings has been steadily climbing the folk league table since her Drifting Point EP debut back in 2011. Her latest offering ‘Wild & Wicked Youth’ backed by The Greenwood band places her in the first division.

Micah P Hinson’s modern folk opera ‘The Holy Strangers’ may not be the most commercial thing he’s ever released, but it’s certainly his most ambitious and compelling.

While Ian Felice’s ‘In the Kingdom of Dreams’ may not leave you feeling full of the joys of life, it does find grace in sorrow, which is perhaps, in these times, the best balm we can ask for.

As the title “After All These Years” might suggest, this is a retrospective set marking Edinburgh’s The Wynntown Marshals ten years together. “Europe’s best Americana band.” Here’s to the next decade.

Carolina Sky is the first solo release from Pete McClelland who co-founded Hobgoblin Music with his wife, Mannie. With the songs focusing on a real and imagined journey across the USA, it’s a refreshing airy listen.

Multi-platinum and 7-time Grammy nominated singer-songwriter Joan Osborne offers up her interpretations of material spanning Bob Dylan’s oeuvre from the early classics to more recent material.

Double albums can often be an overindulgence with a surfeit of padding, but, a chance to show two sides to her musical sensibilities, this is well up there with the better ones.

Hoge may not be pushing any thematic or musical envelopes, but you can hear his heart beating in every track of what is a very solid and immensely listenable album.

For Beast Epic, his fourth solo release via Seattle’s Sub-Pop label, Iron & Wine returns to his introspective, confessional style with which he first made his name. It is the quieter more fragile moments that glow the brightest.

Joe Newberry and April Verch clearly had a great time recording ‘Going Home’ together and their enthusiasm for the material springs from the speakers, you just can’t help but be swept along on the tide.

Now based in New York, Ron Pope has released a dozen albums in the past ten years, ‘Work’, his thirteenth, was a conscious decision to recreate the music of any bar band worth their beer money, drawing on the experiences and people in his life from the age of thirteen.