Thomas Blake

Thomas Blake shares his Top 10 Albums of 2023. As he states in his introduction, it was no easy task to whittle down from hundreds to just ten, but here they are…including Bex Burch, John Francis Flynn, ØXN, Maxine Funke, Brìghde Chaimbeul and more.

ØXN’s unwillingness to conform in any way to stereotypes makes them one of the most vital acts in any music scene today. CYRM is an uncompromising debut album, like a monolith looming through fog.

The variety and depth of ‘Move into the Luminous’ is breathtaking; Makushin have fashioned an engrossing collection of ten perfect miniatures…ambient epics packaged as pop songs, delicate folk latticeworks enmeshed with impassioned jazz. It’s a stunning achievement.

Harry’s Seagull shows how old songs sung with affection and skill can sparkle like new. Georgia Shackleton’s solo debut is light as a gull’s feather but flush with ideas: it’s one of the freshest and most appealing folk albums of the year.

The alchemy found on ‘hare // hunter // moth // ghost’ is masterful; Kerry Andrew can turn small, rough or difficult things into moments of bright wonder. In You Are Wolf’s hands, transformation is a gift to be celebrated.

We talk to The Furrow Collective (Rachel Newton, Alasdair Roberts, Lucy Farrell and Emily Portman) about their new album, We Know by the Moon – a chilly delight: eleven folk songs blasted by winter winds and steeped in the glow of firelight and moonlight.

Joseph Allred’s New Jerusalem shifts between the cosmic and the cosmopolitan and results in a multilayered album that is often intriguingly dense but never far away from a state of euphoria.

On ‘Look Over the Wall, See the Sky’, John Francis Flynn unropes songs from their historical moorings and lets them barrel downstream…Refreshing and vividly utopian, these songs exist in liberated states that have the feel of radical statements.

The Furrow Collective are simply one of the most formidable combinations of musicians in today’s folk music scene, and in “We Know by the Moon”, they have created one of the year’s outstanding albums.

Alice Gerrard’s Sun To Sun acts both as a tonic and a kick in the pants: it reminds us of the enduring place of protest in folk music but also of the importance of humour and heart in life as well as in art.

“There is Only Love and Fear” is a wholly distinctive musical language, a jazz-inflected improvisational world music that quotes from minimalism without ever being in thrall to its history. When you consider that this is Bex Burch’s solo debut, that’s quite some feat.

We chat to Sheffield’s Melrose Quartet about their new album ‘Make the World Anew’ – a staunch defence of the sheer joy of creativity, allowing for contemporary political songwriting and age-old dance tunes, poignant a cappella standards and complex instrumentals.