Thomas Blake
Thomas Blake
Thomas Blake is an author, poet and music journalist who also works part-time in a museum. He has written two poetry chapbooks, both published by Red Ceilings Press: Ƨ (2023) and Peach Epoch (2025). His fiction has appeared in 404Ink and his poems have been published by Perverse, Anthropocene, And Other Poems and The Shore. He has been writing about music since 2012 and has a particular interest in the experimental, the modern and the weird. He lives in Swindon with his wife, two children and a cat.
“Dream Me a Dream” was Tucker Zimmerman’s final recording, and while his MO was dusty, lo-fi outsider folk, his range was much bigger than those labels imply. This is an album that opens out at every turn. What shines most brightly is Zimmerman’s generosity of spirit — a fitting tribute to this most unconventional and quietly gifted of songwriters.
Félicia Atkinson’s “Sans Visage” reimagines the score to Georges Franju’s 1960 horror “Les Yeux Sans Visage” — a perfect assignment for a master of creepy-beautiful soundscapes. Built around piano and studio electronics and dedicated to Gisèle Pelicot, it’s a perfect example of how experimental music can bridge the gaps presented by time, genre and gender… Its spectral beauty is lingering and at times uncomfortable, but never less than enthralling.
Styrofoam Winos are the antidote to supergroups, and “Any River” is ragged but literate Americana, tall tales told in a drunken drawl, lo-fi sensibilities and high ideals. But what the Winos can also do, as Lenderman has said, is boogie. Influences are wide and subsumed with impressive ease, always underpinned by a rootedness in the traditions of country music. Everything seems to flow.
Frankie Archer’s debut album “The Dance of Death” combines traditional balladry with very contemporary-sounding electronica, resulting in a sound unlike anyone else. Built around the ideas of death and mortality, it is anything but one-dimensionally depressing. Archer is a one-of-a-kind talent with a huge career ahead of her.
Shabason & Krgovich’s “Four Days in June” is an album of subtle, often delicate layers, borrowing from country, sophisticated AOR, laid-back jazz and chamber-pop. This is music that settles on you gently, sometimes like a fine rain or sometimes like dust — songs that patiently take stock as their creators slip into middle age. Deceptively light, wholly profound art.
A free jazz saxophonist known for incendiary live shows, Zoh Amba turns to thirteen guitar-based rock songs on “Eyes Full”, their raw, passionate singing to the fore. Sight and being seen thread the album, and a return to Kingsport reckons with the past. It’s an album so complete and so accomplished that it’s hard to believe that it’s their first foray into songwriting.
On “Long Live Brown Wimpenny,” the eleven-strong Manchester collective are, like The Watersons, both iconoclastic and deeply rooted in tradition. It works precisely because it isn’t a conscious decision: they are simply playing the songs that mean the most to them, in open collaboration and in a vernacular entirely their own — folk music that resounds with originality and freshness.
The final instalment of Folklore Tapes’ Ceremonial County Tapes series is fittingly personal. Mary Stark’s Cumbria side weaves her mother’s home and Conishead Priory’s Buddhist mantras into something intimate and quietly sacred. Monkshood — David Chatton Barker and his eight-year-old son Rowan — then take on Wiltshire’s West Kennett Long Barrow with discordant electric guitar and heavy percussion: ancient ground, thrillingly contemporary sound.
North Carolina’s Magic Tuber Stringband return with “Heavy Water”, their first album as a full-time trio. Inspired by Courtney Werner’s work as an ecologist on a nuclear-contaminated stretch of the Savannah River, it combines intuitive appreciation for the landscape with intellectual and conceptual rigour — an album so engaged with history and place it’s hard to say where those things end and the music begins.
Lady Maisery and Jimmy Aldridge & Sid Goldsmith return with “Wakefire: A Summer Album”, a full-scale double album that trumps its predecessor in both ambition and reward. Presented as a largely chronological account of summer, twenty-seven tracks might sound like something of a throwback in today’s climate of instant gratification, but they make it seem like a revolutionary act, and a hugely gratifying one at that.
On their self-titled debut “Amarante-Cerisier”, Marine Debilly Cerisier and Mauricio Amarante deliver a fitting addition to the canon of Francophone double-acts, with Fontaine and Areski as closest antecedent. Their free-form folk thrives on paradox and fruitful mystery, weaving insistent bone-dry strums, half-whispered vocals and the odd psychedelic keyboard swirl into a deceptive, refractive collection of sweet, sharp songs.