Thomas Blake

While The Great White Sea Eagle shares much with James Yorkston’s previous album, it somehow manages to hit harder on an emotional and visceral level. A new Yorkston album is always a bracing experience, this one more so than most.

There is an openness to La Bête Blanche, a delight in music’s power to elucidate complex ideas simply, and with good humour…. Whatever genre they happen to be joyously ransacking, Storm the Palace are masters of the art of communicating.

Thomas Blake shares his Top 10 Albums of 2022 featuring Maxine Funke, Big Thief, Richard Dawson, Dana Gavanski, Burd Ellen, The Shovel Dance Collective, Bill Callahan, Jacken Elswyth, One Leg One Eye & Angeline Morrison.

The Shovel Dance Collective’s The Water is the Shovel of the Shore is one of the most forward-thinking and original collections of traditional material you’re likely to hear this year, or any year.

The essence of The Little Unsaid’s songcraft is that good things (strange and remarkable things, too) can come out of bad times or uncomfortable situations. Their music is all about those contrasts, and Fable illustrates them more sharply than anything they’ve done before.

Elspeth Anne’s ‘Mercy Me’ is her third album, and the subjects of many of its songs come from a series of dreams and nightmares prompted by the covid lockdown. It is an album full of ideas, but more importantly, full of feeling, a raw, moving triumph.

For all the care and worry on Richard Dawson’s ‘The Ruby Cord’, there is always the possibility of an upsurge of joy, a moment of release… Wherever he currently sits on his 1000-year timeline, he speaks with unparalleled eloquence and imagination about the concerns and the comforts we all face.

Lady Maisery deliver compelling messages in the most memorable ways. ‘tender’, their first studio album in six years, finds them delivering their strongest collection of songs yet and instantly re-establishes them at the forefront of British folk music.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise – despite Stick in the Wheel’s fearsome, uncompromising and unashamedly experimental attitude to folk music; the live recordings featured on Endurance Soundly Caged prove that they can still engage with listeners on the most visceral of levels.

‘You Will Not Die’ finds Darren Hayman at his most withdrawn and introspective, uncovering new truths hidden in well-worn themes…when a songwriter of Hayman’s skill turns the spotlight back on himself – and in doing so creates a new world in miniature scale – it’s worth taking note.

Emboldened by the band’s incredible array of talent, The Magpie Arc’s Glamour In The Grey is an incredibly varied album which shows that there is nothing predictable or pedestrian about folk-rock. It’s a welcome shot in the arm and a wild ride.

We talk to those involved in Saltlines, a massive and ambitious project, that includes the author Raynor Winn, members of Gigspanner Big Band and Deborah Knight. The tour has a few days left and the accompanying double album is out now.