Thomas Blake

With Midwinter Swimmers, The Innocence Mission continue the trend of creating albums of sparkling clarity and coherent vision. The quality is always unfalteringly high throughout, and the tonal and thematic shifts provide enough progression to make every new album essential. This is no exception.

Johnny Coley is a genuine poet, someone with things to say that haven’t been said before. With Mister Sweet Whisper, he has created a document of a crazy, frayed civilization and has made it sound beautiful.

Jennifer Castle’s Camelot is a kind of jousting match between religion and mystic thought and secular, pragmatic humanism. It’s rare for an album of such intellectual depth to be so accessible, but throughout, Castle imbues her songs with wit, candour and melodic charm.

For the latest Ceremonial Counties release from Folklore Tapes, Benjamin D Duvall (Ex-Easter Island Head) explores the fragmentary nature of Merseyside’s Crosby Beach, and Sam McLoughlin delivers one of the most playful pieces in the series so far via eight Herefordshire tales.

Trust Fund’s “Has It Been A While?” drifts by, a thirty-five-minute reverie, gauzy and dreamy and illuminated from within…Jones’ biggest influence here is Nick Drake, and it shows.

Return to Kielderside is, among other things, a document of what has happened between that first Kathryn Tickell release and the present day-It’s like a long-exposure photograph of an important and highly impressive career in constant evolution.

From uncanny atmospherics to heartfelt emotion, The Declining Winter’s ‘Last April’ offers the perfect example of how the combination of sadness, hope and love can be captured in music, perhaps more effectively than any other artform.

Dance of Love feels like it could turn out to be Tucker Zimmerman’s Basement Tapes. Everything about it is fresh and spontaneous, music made on its own terms but with a spirit of collaborative generosity.   

Karl Blau’s Vultures of Love is an album that deserves to be listened to all the way through: when taken together, the hectic elements that make up each individual song coalesce into something whole (and strangely wholesome), and that’s a beautiful thing to experience.

On The Neon Gate, Nap Eyes songs drink deep at the wells of philosophy and literature, but you wouldn’t necessarily know it from a cursory listen. They seem to create a different niche for themselves with every new album; long may it continue.

On More Break-Up Songs, Darren Hayman’s ‘New Starts’ debut, he weaves a personal mythology of love and loneliness. Capturing the minutiae of what happens in a relationship, the results are sometimes humorous, sometimes tear-jerking, and never less than entertaining.

The strength of Mairearad Green & Rachel Newton’s distinctive boundary-pushing “Anna Bhàn” doesn’t lie in nostalgia…it is history in the very living sense of the word, ripe and ardent, and not afraid to look forward.