Thomas Blake

If you look deeper at Jacken Elswyth’s Six Static Scenes, it is a celebration of the other, the road not taken, and as such, it shows just how much scope there is for finding new and unrestricted paths in folk music.

To create an album that works both as a collection of poetry and a musical offering must be doubly difficult, but with Mouthful Of Earth, Alex Neilson has pulled it off with endless originality and lusty lyricism.

Sometimes art floats close to the surface of real life. It isn’t always comfortable, and it must take a certain amount of courage to create. But when it comes off, as it does on Myles O’Reilly’s Cocooning Heart, the results can be singularly fulfilling.

Damien Jurado’s ‘Reggae Film Star’ is an album that owes much of its thematic muscle to the cinema. The musical diversity is all the more striking given the album’s conceptual clarity. It’s an addictive listen, full of faded beauty and lit by distant hope.

Angeline Morrison’s ‘The Brown Girl’ is one of those rare records that feels perfectly weighted, entirely free of anything extraneous…the whole thing feels lighter than air. That is a remarkable achievement, given the gravity of the subject matter in many of these songs.

These songs are funny, sad, hopeful and mordant, and they are always melodically satisfying and musically accomplished. More than twenty albums into their career The Wave Pictures are producing their best and most stylistically varied work.

On ‘Swift Wings’, Justin Hopper & Sharron Kraus demonstrate a delicacy of thought and an ear for the finer detail that elevates the album above mere document. It is a fitting legacy for Victor Neuburg, a misunderstood poet, and a fine work of art in its own right. 

Leyla McCalla’s ‘Breaking the Thermometer’ is both a tribute to Jean Dominique and Michéle Montas and an impassioned defence of democracy in present-day Haiti and a quest towards personal understanding… It’s an extremely intelligent album, but it is also a warm, hopeful, angry, questioning one.

Kinnaris Quintet’s ‘This Too’ may have been conceived in difficult times, but it is an object lesson in making the best out of your circumstances. This is incredibly accomplished music, but more than that it is full of heart and hope.

On Dana Gavanski’s ‘When It Comes’, nothing is ever quite what it seems, unorthodox compositions coax complexity out of deceptively simple songs. It is triumphant and multifaceted, the sound of an artist finding her voice in some style.

Ana Silvera has an uncanny ability to combine discomfort with beauty, strangeness with simplicity. The Fabulist – whose very title casts her as an Angela Carter-like teller of curious stories – is the perfect distillation of these ambiguities. A mesmerising and magical album.

Norwegian record label Hubro is dedicated to jazz and folk-based music that is immersive, improvisational, and uncompromising. Benedicte Maurseth ticks all those boxes, and Hárr swells with a quiet beauty and bites with a keen experimental edge.