Thomas Blake

Trust Fund’s “Has It Been A While?” drifts by, a thirty-five-minute reverie, gauzy and dreamy and illuminated from within…Jones’ biggest influence here is Nick Drake, and it shows.

Return to Kielderside is, among other things, a document of what has happened between that first Kathryn Tickell release and the present day-It’s like a long-exposure photograph of an important and highly impressive career in constant evolution.

From uncanny atmospherics to heartfelt emotion, The Declining Winter’s ‘Last April’ offers the perfect example of how the combination of sadness, hope and love can be captured in music, perhaps more effectively than any other artform.

Dance of Love feels like it could turn out to be Tucker Zimmerman’s Basement Tapes. Everything about it is fresh and spontaneous, music made on its own terms but with a spirit of collaborative generosity.   

Karl Blau’s Vultures of Love is an album that deserves to be listened to all the way through: when taken together, the hectic elements that make up each individual song coalesce into something whole (and strangely wholesome), and that’s a beautiful thing to experience.

On The Neon Gate, Nap Eyes songs drink deep at the wells of philosophy and literature, but you wouldn’t necessarily know it from a cursory listen. They seem to create a different niche for themselves with every new album; long may it continue.

On More Break-Up Songs, Darren Hayman’s ‘New Starts’ debut, he weaves a personal mythology of love and loneliness. Capturing the minutiae of what happens in a relationship, the results are sometimes humorous, sometimes tear-jerking, and never less than entertaining.

The strength of Mairearad Green & Rachel Newton’s distinctive boundary-pushing “Anna Bhàn” doesn’t lie in nostalgia…it is history in the very living sense of the word, ripe and ardent, and not afraid to look forward.

A Thousand Pokes is the most potent expression of Stick in the Wheel’s yet. Their songs ring with the joy of specificity and detail, the ferocious joy of marginalised voices making themselves heard, the angry joy of people reclaiming their heritage.

The Shovel Dance Collective, a kind of avant-folk supergroup, but without any of the hubris that term implies, once again demonstrate, through their new album ‘The Shovel Dance’, how they are changing the way folk music is created, and doing so with breathtakingly, potent tunes.

The latest Folklore Tapes Ceremonial Counties covers Cambridgeshire and London, with Ian Humberstone and Human Hand providing one of the most exciting and challenging instalments yet. 

There are so many elements to Naima Bock’s ‘Below a Massive Dark Land’ that it’s a wonder they can all work together, but wonder appears to be a common reaction to Bock’s music. That’s because she takes risks…it confirms her as a major songwriter.