Thomas Blake

Mathias Kom, along with his band The Burning Hell deliver an album that is easily their best to date. One that proves there is more to this anarchic, self-consciously verbose band than jokes. Public Library is an album of surprising emotional depth and musical variety.

Eight years after their debut we are finally treated to a follow-up from Rusalnaia – Sharron Kraus and Gillian Chadwick… one of the most stunning albums I have heard all year, and one whose power remains long after the songs have faded.

It is the exploratory feel of Mjelva and Rydvall’s playing that makes Vårdroppar something special, something transcends musical fashion. It has an almost jazzy quality to it, seemingly at odds with the traditional nature of the material.

A typically bold, distinctive and refreshing album from Alasdair that also proves he has an unerring ear for a successful collaboration. The importance of the unorthodox sounds added by Green cannot be overstated – they are further evidence that folk can and must adapt to – even embody – change.

Seamus Cater’s latest record, ‘The Three Things You Can Hear’, introduces a unique and singular sound, a truly original record with a cosmopolitan and at times improvisational feel.

The stories contained here might well refer to a well-known period of history, but the angles at which they come at that familiar narrative, the microcosms they create, are truly individual and at times unprecedented. War Stories is a courageous, often demanding and ultimately satisfying project.

The Silver Lake Chorus is one of the most unexpectedly contemporary-sounding records you are likely to hear this year, featuring some truly top drawer songs, made to measure, by some of the finest songwriters around.

Eyeland is like nothing else you are likely to hear, unless you have direct access to the future, but beneath the impressive and immersive layers of meaning and narrative, beneath the squall, the surprise and the silence, exists a spirited set of songs that are clearly the work of one of the best and most confident bands in America.

On Browser Faraone and his Nordic sidekicks come at a venerable genre from an entirely different angle, and give it a welcome shake-up, while never sacrificing deft songcraft and dextrous lyricism.

In the same way that the idea of home could not exist without the possibility of travel, tradition means nothing without evolution. Storied Sounds encapsulates this concept with breathtaking simplicity and vibrancy.

A record on which the modern and the classical collide and whose restful exterior conceals a heart of dark, beautiful energy. William Blake would surely have approved.

An exhaustively beautiful paean to place and time. We should perhaps listen to it in the same way that Moult conceived and recorded it: in stillness and solitude, with our minds at sea.