Neil McFadyen

Avenging & Bright, a crossover between folk, pop and electronica, is bursting with confidence, and rightly so. Once again Damien O’Kane has recorded an album so highly polished it shines, it dazzles. Read our review and watch his new video for Poor Stranger.

Once again, this year, the team at Hands Up For Trad presented a magnificent event, celebrating the very best in Scots trad music from 2017. Neil McFadyen shares the highlights and winners from the evening.

Blessed with a peerless voice, possessed of a remarkable talent for arranging both contemporary and traditional song, and surrounded by musicians of the highest calibre, with Angels & Men, Kate Rusby offers the very best musical backdrop anyone could hope for this Christmas.

Providing more energy than a tanker full of Lucozade, 25 years on the Peatbog Faeries sound every bit as fresh and, above all, enthusiastic as they did when they headed out from Skye all those years ago. Live@25 is an exceptional live album by an exceptional live band.

This month, Karine Polwart releases her latest studio album A Pocket of Wind Resistance. She has just finished ten performances of Wind Resistance at The Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh, and we were keen to ask her about the inspiration behind those live performances, the attendant studio release and what else these wonders might lead to.

With Midnight Milk, Adam Holmes demonstrates his willingness to mine the rich creativity behind his work and bring to the surface previously unimagined gems. Adam Holmes and the Embers have created an album that digs deep into the soul and finds it a place of calm comfort.

With Dead Man’s Dance (Dawns y Gŵr Marw) ALAW have not only created an impressive follow up to their 2013 debut, they’ve surpassed the brilliance of Melody with an even more invigorating, wider-ranging exploration of Welsh poetic and musical traditions. It is an inspired and unique album.

Karine Polwart’s music and poetry, with Pippa Murphy’s exquisite settings, haven’t replicated the theatre production; it has brought Wind Resistance to a wider audience, furnished it with portability. Beautiful, potent, and engaging; A Pocket of Wind Resistance gives Karine Polwart’s enthralling theatrical début a satisfying permanence.

It’s no wonder that Naomi and Paul received such a warm, exuberant reception in Glasgow. Over the course of two sets they performed such a startling variety of music, and they performed it with elegance, warmth and, above all, passion. Expect the unexpected when you go to see Naomi Bedford and Paul Simmonds play live.

As Julie Fowlis continues to develop her broad repertoire of Gaelic song, alterum succeeds in exploring connections with other languages, cultures and art forms that enrich her music even further. Above all, though, alterum is, quite simply, an album of the most beautiful music.

With his fourth studio album The Water Of Leith released this month, Blue Rose Code continues to draw on his increasingly inventive ability, as he quietly weaves flavours from a range of musical influences and personal experience, to produce his most thoroughly absorbing album to date.

We talk to Christine Primrose about Gaelic song and her latest album ‘Gràdh is Gonadh – Guth ag aithris’. She is to be inducted into the Scottish Traditional Music Hall of Fame in recognition of her contribution to Gaelic music.