Thomas Blake

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.

Archangel Hill is Shirley Collins’s third album since returning to the studio half a decade ago; this album and its two predecessors seem almost to relish their maturity and at 87, she continues to create some of the most exceptional music of her career.

The Declining Winter is an integral, if obscure, feature of the British musical landscape, like a stone circle hidden behind a housing estate and Adams’ latest offering, Really Early, Really Late, is an engrossing, sometimes playful, frequently pensive, and never less than captivating album.

‘Hold. Star. Return’ finds David A. Jaycock exploring more fully the world of antique electronica. A fuzzy, off-kilter melodicism pervades much of this weirdly beautiful album, which manages to be constantly aware of the past and yet never sentimental.