Albums

A free jazz saxophonist known for incendiary live shows, Zoh Amba turns to thirteen guitar-based rock songs on “Eyes Full”, their raw, passionate singing to the fore. Sight and being seen thread the album, and a return to Kingsport reckons with the past. It’s an album so complete and so accomplished that it’s hard to believe that it’s their first foray into songwriting.

Eleven songs of top-drawer Americana, “Coin-O-Matic” is pure Deer Tick: unfiltered, honest, at ease in their own skin. Two decades in and self-produced for the first time, they draw on Rhode Island’s half-mythic characters and wear the Springsteen influence honestly with the closing five-song sweep, ultimately confirming the album’s quality — a long-storied band taking aim and hitting all their targets.

On “Long Live Brown Wimpenny,” the eleven-strong Manchester collective are, like The Watersons, both iconoclastic and deeply rooted in tradition. It works precisely because it isn’t a conscious decision: they are simply playing the songs that mean the most to them, in open collaboration and in a vernacular entirely their own — folk music that resounds with originality and freshness.

Neon Summer Skin is built around a simple revelation: childhood doesn’t end on schedule, and its afterglow can hit hardest when you think you’ve left it behind. Bedouine returns to the instruments of her early years — piano, trumpet, brass — and wraps memory in bossa nova sway, jazz warmth, and a touch of psychedelia. The result is intimate without being small, and deeply, unguardedly felt.

The final instalment of Folklore Tapes’ Ceremonial County Tapes series is fittingly personal. Mary Stark’s Cumbria side weaves her mother’s home and Conishead Priory’s Buddhist mantras into something intimate and quietly sacred. Monkshood — David Chatton Barker and his eight-year-old son Rowan — then take on Wiltshire’s West Kennett Long Barrow with discordant electric guitar and heavy percussion: ancient ground, thrillingly contemporary sound.

On first listen, REXEN sounds like an introspective singer-songwriter. He isn’t. “The Chauffeur,” his first full studio album, recorded at Real World Studios with John Parish on the mix, swings from intoxicated baritone croon to high register, bending faintly sinister Americana into one new shape after another. The result is an album designed for deep engagement, one that rewards close listening and lingers long after it ends.

Out now on International Anthem, Jeff Parker ETA IVtet’s “Happy Today” is the perfect example of why we need to go deep every so often, to a place constructed with care and attention and absolute creative freedom, by people who understand each other innately as human beings and artists.

The Handover return with “New Old Medicine,” out June 5th via Sublime Frequencies. The Egyptian-rooted trio of Aly Eissa, Ayman Asfour and Jonas Cambien follow their 2024 debut with a second long-form composition, recorded in Berlin by Rabih Beaini. Oud, violin and vintage organ move through one continuous piece into something psychedelic and strange.

GALVEZTON is the one-man vehicle of songwriter Robert Kuhn, and on “Ocean Cabaret” he folds surf-streaked psych, folk and Gulf Coast dust into something all his own. These were the late-night kitchen songs his wife overheard and pushed him to release — recordings kept intentionally bare, foregrounding voice, guitar and the emotional grain of his writing. Music for healing.

On “The Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music”, Marisa Anderson reinterprets music from places the United States has been in conflict with since 1970, drawn from Harry Smith’s private collection of nearly a thousand records. It feels like a very open-armed project and a gesture of connecting that could hardly be better timed — beautifully studied and played, and a resounding success.

North Carolina’s Magic Tuber Stringband return with “Heavy Water”, their first album as a full-time trio. Inspired by Courtney Werner’s work as an ecologist on a nuclear-contaminated stretch of the Savannah River, it combines intuitive appreciation for the landscape with intellectual and conceptual rigour — an album so engaged with history and place it’s hard to say where those things end and the music begins.

Lady Maisery and Jimmy Aldridge & Sid Goldsmith return with “Wakefire: A Summer Album”, a full-scale double album that trumps its predecessor in both ambition and reward. Presented as a largely chronological account of summer, twenty-seven tracks might sound like something of a throwback in today’s climate of instant gratification, but they make it seem like a revolutionary act, and a hugely gratifying one at that.