Albums

Farmer Dave and The Wizards of The West is a trip unlike anything else you are likely to take this year. This is music that cannot be contained. Resistance is futile.

Jack Cade’s latest offering is a relentless and glorious wallow in imperfect contrition. Very much a lockdown record, one for dark nights, short days and a hope in your heart. A red sky at night record and an astonishing one.

Such Times is an album of great authority, musical diversity and consummate skill. Like a good late vintage port, Steve Tilston really does seem to improve with age.

Up The Cut is a beautiful album. A raw, but entirely seductive, performance. One for all lovers of traditional songs delivered with minimal frills. More please Jon!

Alors Quoi is an album that’s soaked in the otherworld as well as the subconscious one. Its themes revel in questions rather than answers. It’s mesmeric sound creeps into your psyche and nestles there; snug with its low-key groove. One that will linger.

On ‘In the Furrows of Common Place’, Jim Ghedi brings focus to unrest, land enclosure and austerity. It is a stunning and remarkable album with bags of passion, creativity and precision from the always fascinating Ghedi.

Including members of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra it’s a curious, but entirely engaging mix of musicians on Songs of the Sea, a moving, sincere album, and one that promises interesting things to come from Green.

TRADarrr are mining a rich seam of traditional songs in their search for material, but it is the flair and imagination going into the arrangements that set them apart as proven here.

With The Silver Sun, Eamon O’Leary has created an album that reminds of the things we may have forgotten over the past twelve months. He extends to us the “forgiveness of time.” In these days we need to hold on to that and to each other.

Kristin Davidson and Carolyn Phillips, who hail from Austin Texas, make a resilient combination – while their band name suggests a toughness to their music they also know tenderness.

Sweet As Honey is an album filled with themes of metaphorical journeys, the happiness of community and the soul-affirming warmth of the earth, it is a jubilant, inspiring, and genuine feel-good album.

Described as Finnish folk-bluegrass, Paula Wolksi’s “Lato” is a wonderful album, diverse and stirring, bound up in joy, love and first-class musicianship.