Thomas Blake

Gigspanner Big Band talk about their new album, Turnstone, revealing an insight into an album that exists in a tradition of sprawling and inclusive experimentalism and where variation and difference are celebrated and encouraged.

The songs on Alex Rex’s ‘The National Trust’ may revel in bitterness and humiliation, but they are real and unflinching and fearsomely clever and often beautiful. Neilson remains an absolute one-off.

It’s time Jeffrey Lewis was recognised as one of the best lyricists of his generation, The Even More Freewheelin’ should do more than cement that status. All things being fair, it should go down as one of the best albums of his career.

Oxfordshire and Derbyshire are the latest Ceremonial Counties to get the Folklore Tapes treatment, courtesy of nebulous experimental collective The Funz and audio archaeologist Mark Vernon. Both tracks are awash with unexpected and often eerie beauty.

The Burning Hell’s ‘Ghost Palace’ may sound like an acceptance of Earth’s fate, but there are subtle signs that life…in a way, the diversity that artists like Kom bring to the world is one of the things that make it a future worth fighting for. 

Gigspanner Big Band’s ‘Turnstone’ is a great example of how traditional song can provide a template for exciting new musical discovery. It’s also a career-defining release from one of folk’s most powerfully creative groups.

Teeth of Time is Joshua Burnside’s most rounded, complex and layered work to date. That said, the jagged edges and black depths that have characterised his music for a decade are still there, only now they are illuminated by a fragile beauty.

With Hinterland, Gerry Diver and Lisa Knapp wanted to create something ‘raw and real and unrestrained,’ something that flies in the face of the notion that folk music is a static form…this gloriously free-spirited album is the perfect example of folk’s potential for reinvention. 

Frog’s Daniel Bateman is (still) one of the world’s finest, most singularly gifted songwriters. 1000 Variations on the Same Song might dip liberally into America’s grimy gutters or get its sustenance from heartbreak, but I still can’t listen without a giant lunatic grin.

Jim Ghedi’s ‘Wasteland’, for all its anger and anguish, provides us with many moments of beauty. It is a timely reminder of the potency of art in a world that seems to be turning uglier by the day, and it might just be Ghedi’s masterpiece.

Given the solitude in which it was written, Midsummer Tideline is a surprisingly sociable album, full of warmth and the vigour of shared creativity, and it adds yet another string to Ian Humberstone’s already impressive bow. 

Matt Hsu’s Obscure Orchestra’s ‘Forest Party’ and ‘Noodle’ are fearsomely eclectic albums. Genre boundaries dissolve, and everything is suspended freely, creating its own universe with all the randomness and beautiful chaos it implies. He proves that home can exist wherever there is hope and community.