Thomas Blake

With A Tarot Of The Green Wood, Burd Ellen successfully tread entirely new ground. It is a suitably bewitching, disconcerting and often profoundly moving experience from the most innovative duo in folk music.

VRÏ’s ‘islais a genir’ is an album that honours variety and positively revels in its own complex, colourful identity, by turns thoughtful and celebratory. A formidable artistic and cultural statement.

Wyld Love Songs is more of a companion piece than a follow-up to David John Morris’s solo debut. It displays a sense of fun and freedom and the songs, show the generosity of the human spirit in all its humour, wisdom and sadness.

While ‘…And Take The Black Worm With Me’, the new solo album from One Leg One Eye (Ian Lynch of Lankum), is not for the faint of heart it is certainly worth taking the plunge: its immense depths are as emotional as they are musical and conceal a haunting beauty.

Saltlines is a massive, ambitious and highly unusual project; the fact that it feels perfectly judged at every moment is down to the sheer excellence of Gigspanner Big Band’s musicianship and the touching, clear-eyed nature of everything Raynor Winn writes or speaks. It is a constant delight. 

Impressively, with KIN, Sharron Kraus has managed to knit the two threads – seriousness and strangeness – together into one of the most rewarding, accomplished and unexpectedly moving albums of the year.

Pieces of Driftwood, despite or perhaps because of the varied origins of its songs, is a perfect introduction to Maxine Funke’s very special work. These are small glimpses into dreamworlds, always invisibly tethered to a uniquely described reality.

Erlend Apneseth’s Nova never shies away from the exploratory spirit that has defined his career. It is an album of colour and contrast, of human intimacy and wild natural grandeur.

For the last few years, David A. Jaycock has been taking his practice into increasingly experimental and hauntological territory, and it is a joy to behold. This collection is the music of the looking glass, and Jaycock captures it better than anyone.

British-Israeli collective Staraya Derevnya’s “Boulder Blues” is an unnerving, brilliant album that revolves around the twenty-plus minute opus Bubbling Pelt, which sounds like Comus and Faust fighting over a rare cache of Japanese psychedelic rock.

With LAS, Brìghde Chaimbeul, Ross Ainslie and Steven Byrnes have delivered a highly accomplished album that, probably more than any other you’ll hear this year, unifies innovation and tradition.

Perspectives On Tradition functions as a chapter in a manifesto for how folk music should be made and how tradition should be thought about. Stick in the Wheel are fearless when it comes to following their own standards, the results are rarely short of astonishing.