Richard Hollingum

While musically reflective, the words on Gemini II, the latest album from Johanna Warren, are everything. These songs are snapshots of conversations, conversations between two people, between two sides of the same person or just conversations that should have been had but were not.

There is a power and a steadfastness to these songs that can look back but also look forward. However there is also a great ability to illustrate and above all, this is an album about landscape, images painted for us by the words of Stuart Forester…

The Ballad of Shirley Collins soundtrack is a great springboard to find out more. It is also an anthology, or a miscellany, that whilst having a foot back in time – sixty years ago and even before that – it also has a foot in the present.

Here’s A Health is an album with many attractive aspects and several assets: A good choice of song, an appealing underlying humour and the production really brings out the strengths of their clear voices and close harmonies.

Neon may be an album of night, of place, of colour and light. But it is also an album of contrasts, contrasts that are subtle, contrasts that are hidden in the words and contrasts that look into the emotional light and dark.

Assembly Lane’s dynamic arrangements of traditional and contemporary material on their self-released debut take us another step on the way forward for traditional music.

Here is a different, experimental and immersive experience from Bare Bones that is full of the elements of folk, acoustic and world music, full of the elemental, and full of body, shape and texture. Well worth the listen – and do touch the exhibits.

We decide that sticking ‘Songs of the Hollow’, the new album from Irish band cua, into a genre would be pointless and instead sit back and enjoy an album of variety and of voices, of echoes and of influences, and of emotions and passions.

At one level, this is an album of soft, subtle songs that are just right for those important moments of the day, or night, when something calming and reflective is called for. At another, deeper level, this is McLarty, sharing her journey with us.

Topette!!’s debut album C’est Le Pompon is one that should be on all your radars. It’s all here, beautifully whipped up and raring to go – a wonderful melange of French, English, and all points East, West, North and South.

LOWP are a folk band from the North East of England, formed in late 2009. Their music is drawn from Tyneside, Durham and Northumberland, and has a quality that is unique to that area, a meeting of Scottish and English but suffused with its own vitality and its distinctive accents.

Throughout the whole album, there is a sense of Hart enjoying himself, little glints of a wry smile here and there, a little joke held to himself. And, importantly, here is another generation learning from the previous generations, moulding it in some cases but still presenting the tradition. Absolutely excellent.

Following a successful Kickstarter campaign, Richie and Rosie release their second album this month. Nowhere in Time features songs and tunes of variety and clarity with elements of reflection and introspective lyrics. Give it a go.

“The more I have listened to this album, the more interesting it has become”…Jim White enjoys telling stories and the stories on Waffles, Triangles and Jesus are as good an example of his art as you can get…this is storytelling first, with the music a very close second.

Ten great tracks from Old Salt Union that have set out their stall on this, their Compass Records debut. They have more than enough talent and go to make it and I am already looking forward to their follow-up.

EB=MC2, an album produced in Ehud Banai’s native Israel brings these two together – and shows that the adage about old dogs and tricks is far from the truth. “And your guitar, so clear and bright, is like a cure to the broken heart”.