Thomas Blake

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.

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.