Albums

At the end of the day perhaps The Inevitable Train Wreck isn’t so inevitable. Hope is where you find it and for Beans on Toast it’s there if you look hard enough and work for change. How do you like them beans?

Fresh from an appearance at The Great British Folk Festival with many miles still to travel, Merry Hell deliver an unforgettable joyous, engaging and wonderful evening to the crowd at South Petherton.

The Loft Tapes is a powerful and heady cocktail, yet at times almost mystical as well, bringing together the flavours and ingredients of four different continents, and producing a sumptuous feast for the ears.

This is an album that is unashamedly political and whilst it contains stories back from across history, these serve to remind us of how we got to where we are now, and that we should think before we are led down the same route again. An album of protest and of warning but also of hope and of aspiration.

The drifting quality and gentle countrified pace of ‘Up On High’ doesn’t solely just apply to the music; for Cabic it’s a deliberate way of life, a freewheeling philosophy that’s never sounded quite this convincing.

Thirty Pounds of Bone and Philip Reeder board Girl Emily, a 1974 fishing boat to perform nine new arrangements of traditional fishing/maritime songs, as the skipper and his mate go about their business of fishing.

Colin Irwin heads to Butlin’s, Skegness for the weekend. The temptation to conjure images of faded glamour and unashamed tack and launch into full Hi-De-Hi mode is almost overwhelming. And yet, The Great British Folk Festival is a resounding success story.

Sam Amidon steps into the mystic’s “memory theatre” as he draws from the Anthology of American Folk Music. Expansive and eccentric in equal measure, it just goes to show there’s plenty more digging worth doing.

You must give Cinelli great kudos for his boundless approach to these recordings, he’s allowed the music to guide him down many satisfying and unpredictable avenues. ‘Night Songs’ is an album with a clear thematic purpose that emphatically realises its ambition.

It’s not enough just to have faith in yourself, you have to have talent too. Like We’re Talking is an album of subtle beauty and proves Betsy Phillips has plenty of both.

For all its range and variation, for all the subtle and beautiful musical flourishes and lingering sonic effects, The Victorians is essentially a call to arms. Harp & a Monkey have made a stunning album that pleads the case for folk song as a working-class mode of expression.

Band Together cuts across Americana genres but maintains a cohesive sound and identity with melodies and choruses designed to fire up any crowd – a terrific album.