Thomas Blake

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.

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