Thomas Blake

They can be cosmopolitan in one breath, ethereal in the next. Their songs can be sad and yearning or darkly humorous. Their arrangements can sound, almost at once, ancient and startlingly contemporary. The rapid evolution of Bird In The Belly into one of our finest folk acts is a joy to behold.

We chat to Luke Daniels, our current Artist of the Month, about his new album “Old Friends & Exhausted Enemies”. Daniels is one of folk music’s true originals. Whatever he plans to do next is unlikely to be quite like anything else.

Richard Dawson’s ‘2020’ is a sincere appeal to optimism, and above all else, sincerity is Dawson’s calling card. This is art shorn of artifice, pop against populism, and it just so happens to be one of the defining statements of our times.

Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh and Thomas Bartlett have created an album that is seductively dreamlike but sometimes sad, layered like a palimpsest but accessible on every one of those layers. It is unlikely you will hear a better instrumental album this year.

Luke Daniels’ “Old Friends & Exhausted Enemies” is full of mystery and emotion. It is the work of a discerning reader, a remarkable songwriter, and a musician with the touch of an alchemist.

Hannah James has created an album that explores life from countless angles. It is sad, fun, wise, angry and thought-provoking in equal measure and it has a real flair for the dramatic. She has established herself as a highly individual and almost unparalleled songwriter.

Few artists can so effectively use the strangeness of the old to pin down the strangeness of the new. The Fiery Margin achieves this with the vigour and surefootedness of an artist fully engaged with the world and yet never fully at peace with it.

On Green Ribbons, each singer brings something unique and subtly experimental to the table, and the result is a collection of songs that transcends genre and fuses the history of vocal music with the most exciting aspects of its present.

The Lines We Draw Together is a piece of work that sounds both fresh and full of experience, an album for our times, but steeped in history, its poetry is not short on intellectual rigour, but its message is one of earthy wisdom and simplicity – an important album, an album that is full of life.

The Outlander may seem like the slightest and the straightest of Jim Moray albums, but in truth, it is the most condensed and representative document of the artist that we have, and that alone – besides all the great songs, of course – makes it a treasure.

Erlend Apneseth Trio demonstrate that wildness is still possible in folk music, as is a democratic, inclusive form of experimentalism. You are unlikely to hear a more innovative album all year, or one more in touch with its roots. Salika, Molika is an avant-folk marvel.

The quiet magic of I Feel Nothing Most Days is difficult to pin down, but in that essential unknowability, that sense of mystery, lies some of its appeal…like an instant, a snapshot of a rainy afternoon, slightly blurred, mysterious and beautiful.