Albums

There is no other songwriter working at quite the imaginative level that Dawson is consistently reaching these days, and in Circle, he has found a band whose richness, variety and adaptability is the perfect complement to his unique vision. Henki is a strong late contender for album of the year.

These are Folk Radio UK’s favourite Top 100 Albums of 2021 selected from the many albums that were reviewed over the past year covering folk, roots, alternative and global music. Dig deeper by listening and reading our reviews.

Analog Africa, Lankum’s Ian Lynch, Dan Torigoe of Doleceola Recordings and Landworker’s Alliance are among those that delivered some spectacular compilation albums this year. Here are our favourite Top 10 Compilation Albums of 2021.

Ben Howard’s latest album ‘Collections From The Whiteout’ found the singer-songwriter at his most experimental. As part of his four-date stripped-back UK tour, the Bristol audience were offered a different perspective of that album’s songs alongside the bonus of enjoying them in such rare intimate settings.

As songwriters go, nobody puts quite as much on the table as Neilson. In a live setting such raw experiences are both valuable and, in this case, hugely rewarding. Memory, Speak is a moment in time, a document of Alex Rex at their most formidable and fragile.

The debut winter-themed EP by Milkweed is something of an outlier…They seem intent on reviving the more outlandish, eccentric traditions of folk music, where old and new religions intermingle and where strange, bewitching sounds proliferate. This can only be a good thing.

Aisha Badru doesn’t teach and doesn’t preach, she simply sings her truths. That we can learn from the lessons of “The Way Back Home” only serves to make her messages that much more important.

While London-based Treetop Flyers stay comfortably within their established sound for their fourth album Old Habits, it is veined with affecting understated new tricks to produce a sublime experience.

There’s an affecting tenderness to Ken Pomeroy’s words and delivery that touches on emotions we can all relate to. It’ll be interesting to hear how she develops her craft over the next few years, but her lights shine brightly enough for now.

In the wake of the experience of the past two years, ‘The Beat Goes On’ is clearly an album Sean Taylor needed to make, and, as we emerge back into some sort of light, it is very much one we need to hear.

Spell Songs II is a timely and beguiling listen. It is a collection to share and reflect upon. So, gather round, cherish the songs, Macfarlane’s words and Morris’s imagery and steep yourself deep in the natural world that surrounds us and prepare to be spellbound.

Based around the one constant figure of Stephen Cracknell, The Memory Band’s sixth album Colours, again features a number of special guests. Existing on the margins of folk and electronica, they manage to bring a touch of the sublime to these liminal states.