Richard Hollingum

Subtlety and grace abound in this album. There is something about voices in harmony that make you feel good – and Landless have this to perfection. There are no airs and graces, just beautiful harmonies, their sound uplifting and spiritual, even ethereal.

Thom Ashworth leaves us wanting more on his latest EP ‘Hollow’, but it is one of those rare occasions when, having heard it for the first time, you want to listen to it again and again.

Richard catches Josienne and Ben in Leicester – “there is a new maturity to them – the melancholia is still there, the introspection and self-reflection survive, but the control has shifted and a new path is being explored.”

Morning Haikus, Afternoon Ragas is an album of poetry in guitar music. The space around Buck Curran’s music allows it to grow and change, to become part of the landscape yet also allows you to become part of it as well. Join in.

Part 2 of the Bert Jansch reissue, A Man I’d Rather Be from Earth Recordings covers four albums and a journey across 6 years, that takes Bert from style to style and from strength to strength.

Their early work was full of frailty; now, on this album, there is a new maturity that is reflected in strength with, perhaps, more than a touch of grit. The melancholia is still there, the introspection and self-reflection survive, but the control has shifted.

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.