Thomas Blake

Kitty Macfarlane’s Namer Of Clouds sets her apart as a singular songwriting talent. It is an album to savour, a debut full of old wisdom and bubbling over with new ideas.

With Many a Thousand, Aldridge and Goldsmith have created a record whose songs are immediate and politically necessary, and whose melodies will remain in the memory for years to come. 

Jackie Oates took the time to talk to Folk Radio UK about the creative process behind the recording of The Joy of Living. Her answers provide a rare insight into a method that is both unorthodox and entirely natural.

When All Is Still may be an album with its roots in tradition, but it has a freshness that makes these old songs seem wonderfully new. It is one of the best collections of traditional songs you’ll hear all year. Read our review and watch the video premiere of Ploughman Lads.

The Joy of Living is the seventh studio album from Jackie Oates, also our Artist of the Month for August. It is her most personal yet, covering an intensely personal period of her life in which she celebrated the birth of her daughter Rosie and bid an emotional and loving farewell to her beloved father.

In Enter The Stream, Prana Crafter, the musical alter-ego of William Sol, has created an album that is deeply intuitive, interpretive and built to last. It cocks a snook – albeit a very abstract snook – at the idea of throwaway music for mass consumption, instead attempting to create lasting compositions that take the rhythms of the natural world as a blueprint.

Since their debut in 2003, The Wave Pictures have been releasing albums at the rate of more than one a year and Brushes With Happiness is another winner, an album of raw emotion and even rawer musicianship from one of the UK’s most underrated bands. 

This willingness to engage – emotionally and physically, with internal and external landscapes – is what sets Toby Hay apart from virtually everyone else currently making instrumental folk music. The Longest Day is a triumph, a thing of shimmering beauty.

It’s refreshing when an album explores weighty themes with sincerity and gravitas, and even more so when the artist in question combines the personal with the abstract without diluting either.

A Hawk And A Hacksaw’s music is all about making connections between cultures, and in that respect, their latest release is one of the widest-ranging and most daring yet.

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.