Thomas Blake

Much of the album is about the constant interplay between pastoral prettiness and modern-world weirdness, about how there is strangeness and partial alienation in what we think we know…It is this tension that makes the whole album so beautiful, and so unnerving.

Anna and Elizabeth are curators of a rich and varied musical tradition, of which change and growth is also an important part. This willingness to experiment has helped produce a piece of work that, if there is any justice in the world, will be recognised as one of the groundbreaking American folk albums of this century.   

With Songs From The Seasons, Joshua Burnell delivers a collection of assured, dynamic takes on a wide range of folk songs. An album full of loving detail and exceptional musicianship, an album of genuine ambition, scope and variety.

It’s no great stretch to say that Anne Briggs is our greatest folk singer, and if this new release brings her incomparable talent to a wider audience, then it will be the least she deserves. 

III is a folk album played with the inventiveness of jazz and the control of chamber music. It is suffused with pastoral light but anchored in earthy realism, unshowy but technically innovative, driven by emotion but never sentimental.

Senyawa take on the role of outsiders. Their music is a constant series of volte-faces against what is predictable or what is considered normal. Or rather, they distill the weirdness, the wonderful crookedness, inherent in what passes for normality in a fast-moving and hugely diverse culture.

Great art can often come from the darkest places…many of these songs were born out of very real human experience. They are musically inventive and lyrically astute documents of this experience, but more than that they offer a clearer way of understanding it, and perhaps even a way of helping to overcome its darker periods.

On Sweet Thursday Ivar tackles contemporary America from a personal standpoint, through the lens of literature and with an omnivorous knowledge of the history of music. Put like that it sounds dry, even academic, but Ivar’s wit and melodic sense ensures that it is nothing of the sort. Watch his new video Down by the Jacaranda.

Molly Drake was a songwriter of vivid vision and an author of strange, calm, ambiguous poems which deserve to be remembered on their own terms. This release will go some way towards making sure that happens.

St. Peter is an album full of shimmering, finely crafted layers. Emma Tricca has employed an enviable array of talented collaborators to help achieve this unique effect, but it is her own approach to music-making that really marks this out as a serious piece of work and her best album to date.

Utopia and Wasteland explores a formidable range of human emotions and political ideas, and one that flits easily between the minuscule detail and the grand statement. An exceptional album from one of the most exciting duos not just in folk but in any genre.

Abbey Wood is an unmitigated triumph. Clever and heartfelt, it inverts folk tropes by presenting historical narratives in extremely personal ways or by creating finely-observed urban backgrounds where the more personal songs can play out. Hayter’s haunted, haunting voice holds it all together and makes it fabulously unique.