Mike Davies

Luke Sital-Singh’s ‘Time is a Riddle’ is more of a rebirth than a follow-up, awash with emotion and tumultuous cathedrals of sound. A captivating experience that’s hard to resist falling for.

When not serving as part of Steve Earle’s band The Dukes, husband and wife duo Chris Masterson and Eleanor Whitmore have their own career as The Mastersons. Transient Lullaby is their third album.

Although best known as a producer, Nigel Stonier also has a career as a reedy-voiced solo artist in his own right, Love and Work is his sixth studio album which features a number of guest musicians including Thea Gilmore on backing vocals.

June Star return with their eleventh album ‘Sleeping With The Lights On’. A welcome chance to catch up, a compelling vision of where they are now and where they’re heading.

Daphne’s Flight return two decades after their impressive debut with Knows Time, Knows Change. Individually they are classy performers, together they are utterly sublime. Let’s just hope it doesn’t take quite so long before they take flight again.

The door is open for a new close harmony acoustic female folk duo to get their foot in the gap, and Exeter-based Sound of the Sirens, Abbe Martin and Hannah Wood, are decidedly in with a chance.

This is up there with the very best of homegrown Americana and, if they could get some sort of national radio or TV play to provide the incentive to gig beyond their London stomping grounds, they would deservedly develop the following they assuredly warrant.

Drawing on a mass of musical influences from North and South American pop and folk to Gypsy Jazz & classical music, Elias Krell’s ‘As Eli’ is unquestionably one of the summer’s brightest gems.

William Matheny makes his debut with Strange Constellations, a solid collection of roots rock and countrified pop. Read our review and listen to his cover of Jason Molina’s ‘Just Be Simple’, a bonus track on the UK digital edition.

Idaho’s Hillfolk Noir return with Junkerpunch, a ramshackle rural clatter that is given life by guitar, double bass, banjo and washboard. All beautifully recorded by analogue wizard Mike Coykendall at his Blue room Studio in Portland, Oregon.

On Itinerant Arias, Christopher Paul Stelling sees the storm coming, but his songs, which come from a wide range of unlikely inspirations, are there to provide a bridge over troubled waters.

At the end of the Scott Cook’s booklet for ‘Further Down the Line’ there is a preamble memoir in which he quotes Bruce Cockburn “Kick at the darkness ‘till it bleeds daylight.” This album kicks hard.