Thomas Blake

We chat with Rónán Ó Snodaigh & Myles O’Reilly about their new album, The Beautiful Road, a work of graft and craft as well as exceptional artistry: music like this isn’t just plucked out of the air; it is the result of a serious and well-defined working relationship, nurtured over a period of years.

Glenn Kimpton has quietly carved out a niche as one of the most inventive, intuitive and accomplished guitarists in the business. His latest offering, ‘Ruminate!’, is beautiful, even slightly intoxicating…another assured instalment in Glenn Kimpton’s increasingly impressive catalogue.

The Endless Coloured Ways is a brilliantly realised, perfectly sequenced tribute that, because of the sheer creative variety on show, never spills over into hagiography, and always prioritises Nick Drake’s musical heritage over the cult of his personal history.

Rónán Ó Snodaigh & Myles O’Reilly’s ‘The Beautiful Road’, is a calmative, a sonic balm in times of literal and metaphorical noise, but also a reminder of the verve and the life that can still exist in music. It’s an exceptional feat.

While ‘Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You’ is recognisably a Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy album, it is also a slight departure. These songs have a life-affirming quality, a willingness to exist in the present, and as a result, this is one of Will Oldham’s most rewarding albums.

Although it seems uncompassionate to describe someone’s difficult personal circumstances as artistically rewarding, with ‘The Greater Wings’, Julie Byrne has proved that music can be transformative and reinvigorating, as well as beautiful. There is hope here beneath the sadness, hope of the most life-affirming kind.

On Dream From The Deep Well, Brigid Mae Power has created a piece of art that resonates timelessly on a mythic level…a piece of art brimming with the joy and sadness that hides in plain sight, in the minutiae of everyday life.

On ‘I’ve Got Me’, Joanna Sternberg explores contemporary subjects like anxiety and emotional insecurity with warmth, humour and a deftness of touch. It’s a smart and sometimes sad document that, like many of the most individual works of art, exists beyond genre.

Freda D’Souza’s ‘Windowledge’ is one of the most accomplished debuts of recent times: not just full of promise but perfectly formed in its own right. The fact that she supported Mount Eerie earlier this month is pertinent: these songs, like those of Phil Elverum, whisper fiercely.

On ‘To Be A Cloud’, The Saxophones balance their music on a knife edge – a kind of chilled-out, margaritas-at-the-mall apocalyptica versus a combination of widescreen, salt-tinged psychedelia and dusky bar-room jazz, where big skies and big ideas vie with personal heartache and subdued, nostalgic longing.

Haar might be Lauren MacColl’s most accomplished and rewarding work to date, an ambitious album of painterly beauty, on which the sadness of experience is offset by the constant awareness of the world’s wonders and complexities.  

On ‘Land’, an immersive album of depth and subtlety, Liz Hanks helps us understand how a place changes over time. She reads her surroundings like a vast physical palimpsest, peeling away roads and buildings to examine the earthy underbelly, the strata of human activity and natural change.