Albums

Following an award-winning year as one half of The LYNNeS alongside fellow Canadian Lynn Miles, Lynne Hanson returns to her solo career path for her seventh album of variegated Americana. This album isn’t just words, it speaks from the heart and soul and it will touch yours.

It takes a certain amount of guts to open a folk album with 30 seconds of string quartet music. After that, you have to deliver the goods, which Ned Roberts does in spades on Dream Sweetheart.

Half Moon Light finds The Lone Bellow returning full of ambition with what is, without a doubt, their best and most musically sophisticated work to date.

As the Lost Brothers, Oisin Leech and Mark McCausland have created a disc that subtly shifts moods while creating a framework as comfortable as their Irish hometowns of Navan and Omagh. Their most mature and satisfying works to date.

McCambridge has cultivated a distinctive musical arboretum within which the emotional panorama and insightful perspective afforded by A Northern View has resulted in a powerful and compelling album, as well as one of the best musical responses to Brexit to date.

Dilyn Afon is an essential masterpiece in traditional music collection and interpretation, performed to an exemplary level…It is a journey piece of pure and utterly beautiful music and singing…I implore you all to buy it.

Andromeda, like its predecessor, is a difficult, brilliant, rewarding snapshot of human turmoil…the stature of this formidable album will continue to grow even as the scars it describes begin to heal.

Over the past four albums, the California sextet Dustbowl Revival have served up a steady supply of Dixieland jazz, swing and Depression-era folk songs, but, for their fifth, they’ve charted a new direction, drawing on roots-rock, soul and even funk.

Never before have the many strands of Sam Lee’s work come together as they do on Old Wow. Featuring a remarkable cast of players, Old Wow is his most direct, urgent and moving record to date.

20 years on, Michael McGoldrick and his band return to Celtic Connections to perform Fused, locked into the groove, they stayed there like they’d never been away from the Old Fruit Market in Glasgow. Plus Michael talks us through the album, track-by-track.

The Accidental Falls is the construct of five musicians who have a clear handle of what their music is all about. Eyelids play with care and passion, making it clear they are deserving of a much wider audience.

The Unraveling is Drive-By Truckers first album in just over three years. It has a lot of political ground to catch up on, embracing as it does all of Trump’s presidency to date and the unravelling of the nation in its wake.