Thomas Blake

Beings are the New York City quartet Zoh Amba, Steve Gunn, Shahzad Ismaily and Jim White; their debut album, ‘There is a Garden’, is blistering, beautiful free jazz with an uncommonly sunny and accommodating outlook.

Their talent as vocalists and harmonists is at the heart of Landless’s immense appeal. Lúireach is a reliquary of rich, dramatic tales and a celebration of resolutely feminist togetherness, yet another triumph for the fantastically productive Irish folk scene.

Marina Allen strikes the perfect balance between clarity and abstraction on Eight Pointed Star, fabricating a beautifully coherent but mysterious collection of songs that combine a gift for songcraft with something approaching lyrical genius.

Featuring Agnes Martian, Laraaji, Music for Connection and Hair and Space Museum, Coincidence is a record bursting with the joy of spontaneous creativity. It is both an uncompromising demonstration of free and experimental spiritual jazz and a document attesting to the power of collaboration.

Buck Curran’s ‘One Evening and Other Folk Songs’ is an album of hidden depths. His talent is an alchemical one: seemingly quotidian musical ingredients are turned into rare metals in his hands, and with this eclectic but hugely talented band, the results are doubly impressive.

Eric Chenaux’s recent solo offerings offered a strange and beautiful alchemy quite unlike anything else in popular music. Delights of My Life is a continuation of that magic formula but with a more collaborative focus. Chenaux’s spellbinding run of form shows no signs of stopping.

Sealladh highlights Rachel Newton’s gift for subsuming visual reference points within a musical purview, coming up with melodies that are disarming, deceptively simple and utterly beautiful.

At Fargrounds stops you in your tracks with the sheer excellence of Jacken Elswyth’s playing and then with the breadth of its implications. This is instrumental music that has a lot to say, and it says it with verve, lightness, and great skill.

Littoral Zone feels like a landmark album in Adam Ross’s career, a kind of synthesis of the most impressive elements of his full band and solo work. In a fair world, this literate, funny, humane album would cement his status as a national treasure.

A kind of alternative history of Gastr Del Sol, whose massive importance to the musical landscape of the last thirty years has been massive, a release as exceptional as ‘We Have Dozens of Titles’ should be met with excitement and the highest praise.

A concept album about the physical and spiritual aspects of birth and parenthood, Carlos Niño & Friends’ “Placenta” is a work of warmth, humanity, and unruly anarchic joy, with Niño acting as a catalyst through which the swell of creativity can be filtered and condensed.

Laura J Martin’s Prepared is her strongest, strangest and most distinctive work yet, and proof that after an eight-year break, good things come to those who wait.