Thomas Blake

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.

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.