Album Reviews from the KLOF Mag team and recommendations from KLOF Mag’s Editor.
Albums
by Thomas Blake
On Old Segotia, Seán Mac Erlaine and Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh engage in an intense musical conversation. Rather than compromising between folk and jazz, they create a new palette, crafting varied tracks that shift from smoky grooves to avant-garde improvisation. Augmenting traditional instruments with electronics and field recordings, the duo create a complex, surprising map of new musical terrain.
by Thomas Blake
Emily A. Sprague’s “Cloud Time” is one of the most stunning ambient records in recent memory. Recorded live in Japan, it draws from the “naturalist” school of modular synthesis, engaging with the Japanese tradition of environmental music. Sprague whittled hours of recordings into a suite that is both deeply contemplative and refreshingly human, a “sonic wonderment” of texture and off-the-cuff creativity.
by Thomas Blake
On Merlyn Driver’s debut album, “It Was Also Sometimes Daylight,” there is an ease to his singing and playing that belies the nuance and complexity of his songwriting, which at times approaches genuine poetry. He takes highly personal, confessional songwriting and elevates it with unconventional language. It’s also a timely reminder of the small amount of time and space we all take up on this world.
by Mike Davies
With John Smith’s now much higher profile, these revisited and, at times, transformative reimagined songs should, deservedly, find a far wider acclaim and audience than the originals. At the same time, ‘Gatherings’ serves to remind us that he is one of the true elite on the UK contemporary folk scene.
by Thomas Blake
Greg Jamie is unashamedly preoccupied with the liminal. Across a Violet Pasture, tilts at the hard-to-hit zone between sleep and waking. This is Old Weird America with a nod to the stranger recesses of British hauntology. At times, the Townes Van Zandt comparisons also seem more apposite than ever, a reminder that, for all the uncanny, rootless strangeness of his music, the album is built on Jamie’s outstanding songwriting.
by Bob Fish
Hannah Frances’s Nested in Tangles is a brave and demanding listen. The album’s complex layers reflect the messy, contrary nature of existence, shifting between chaotic brass, gentle folk, and soft jazz. Frances confronts difficult truths about family, loss, and self-appraisal, creating a piece of music that is challenging, unpredictable, and ultimately rewarding in its unflinching honesty and musical ambition.
Swiss-Portuguese guitarist Tiago Almeida releases “Rivages,” an artistic exploration of Portuguese fado reimagined for the classical guitar. The album is a masterful blend of tradition and innovation, drawing on influences from jazz, classical, and even electronic music. Exploring profound themes of migration and identity, “Rivages” promises to be a significant and unique addition to the contemporary classical guitar repertoire.
In his latest release, Archipelago of Shadows, Belgian composer Lieven Martens presents a work of profound gravity. The album, a five-track suite of field recordings and electronics, is directly shaped by his experience as a humanitarian aid worker in eastern Congo, where he interviewed survivors of sexual violence—a practice deliberately used as a weapon of war to shatter communities.
by Thomas Blake
Cerys Hafana’s relationship to the Welsh language is defined by deep-rooted knowledge and appreciation of Welsh folklore, and it’s this immersive attitude to culture, music, language and myth that gives her new album, Angel, its eerie, swooning, dreamlike quality.
Melvin Gibbs’s new album, Amasia: Anamibia Sessions 2, drops October 14, 2025, via Hausu Mountain. This avant-jazz odyssey channels the spirit of Miles Davis’s ’70s fusion, blending recordings across two decades with collaborators like Greg Fox and the late Pete Cosey. Gibbs’s ‘amalgam of ideas transcend genre and categorization.’