Thomas Blake

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.

One of Shane Parish’s reasons for making ‘Liverpool’, was to unlock the inscrutable power that exists within nautical worksongs that makes them timeless and uniquely human. It’s safe to say that he has achieved that goal and made a breathtaking and singular album in the process.

With, After the City, Bird In The Belly have created a concept album that provides a kind of musical prequel to Richard Jefferies visionary novel. Eloquent, lovingly detailed and touched with a welcome dash of experimentalism, they have made it accessible, gripping and mythical.

Staring At Mountains is a strangely visceral album on which we get to hear Adam Ross at his most open. It provides the richest and most detailed snapshot yet of the songwriting and thought processes…of one of Scotland’s most talented singers and songwriters.

Maurice Louca’s ‘Saet El Hazz’ is experimental and uncompromisingly modern, and yet the reaction it elicits feels timeless and instinctual, playing on our love of suspense and our capacity for joy in a way that only great music can.

Thomas Blake shares his Top 10 Albums of 2021 including Grouper, Shannon Lay, C. Joynes, Stick in the Wheel, Sally Anne Morgan, Sarah Louise, Devin Hoff, Richard Dawson, Alasdair Roberts og Völvur and Arab Strap

There is no other songwriter working at quite the imaginative level that Dawson is consistently reaching these days, and in Circle, he has found a band whose richness, variety and adaptability is the perfect complement to his unique vision. Henki is a strong late contender for album of the year.

As songwriters go, nobody puts quite as much on the table as Neilson. In a live setting such raw experiences are both valuable and, in this case, hugely rewarding. Memory, Speak is a moment in time, a document of Alex Rex at their most formidable and fragile.

The debut winter-themed EP by Milkweed is something of an outlier…They seem intent on reviving the more outlandish, eccentric traditions of folk music, where old and new religions intermingle and where strange, bewitching sounds proliferate. This can only be a good thing.

Based around the one constant figure of Stephen Cracknell, The Memory Band’s sixth album Colours, again features a number of special guests. Existing on the margins of folk and electronica, they manage to bring a touch of the sublime to these liminal states.

Elliott is living proof that a well-timed whisper can often be more consequential than a shout, and on December songs he takes that aesthetic to its quietly impressive limit. It is hard to see how this album could have come out any better.

Devin Hoff pays tribute to Anne Briggs through a series of dramatic but somehow faithful rearrangements. Featuring a stellar cast of like-minded Briggs fans, Voices From the Empty Moor looks backwards for inspiration but is entirely contemporary in feel.