Albums

Teeth of Time is Joshua Burnside’s most rounded, complex and layered work to date. That said, the jagged edges and black depths that have characterised his music for a decade are still there, only now they are illuminated by a fragile beauty.

With Hinterland, Gerry Diver and Lisa Knapp wanted to create something ‘raw and real and unrestrained,’ something that flies in the face of the notion that folk music is a static form…this gloriously free-spirited album is the perfect example of folk’s potential for reinvention. 

Frog’s Daniel Bateman is (still) one of the world’s finest, most singularly gifted songwriters. 1000 Variations on the Same Song might dip liberally into America’s grimy gutters or get its sustenance from heartbreak, but I still can’t listen without a giant lunatic grin.

Luke Sital-Singh’s ‘Fool’s Spring’ documents moments of seeking a new life, a period of high highs and lower lows – although the songs here now ring out in a new light.

With April is Passing, Virginia-based violinist and multi-instrumentalist Mike Gangloff has once again presented us with beautiful, complex, original pieces of music, another excellent example of the unique ability of this fascinating musician.

Jim Ghedi’s ‘Wasteland’, for all its anger and anguish, provides us with many moments of beauty. It is a timely reminder of the potency of art in a world that seems to be turning uglier by the day, and it might just be Ghedi’s masterpiece.

Park Jiha is a master of creating conceptual soundscapes, and ‘All Living Things’ is humbling, enchanting and sometimes quietly alarming in the starkness of its structure. It is a beautiful, inimitable creation.

With poetic touchstones that range from the metaphysical and Shakespeare to Dickinson, Plath and Auden, Polly Paulusma’s Wildfires is unquestionably her masterpiece, which, like the title, burns and blazes, forged alike in the anguish and euphoria of love and life.

Acoustic guitar badass and prolific tourer Liam Grant’s ‘Prodigal Son’ comes in like a thunderstorm, with distorted fingerpicked guitar notes hitting the speakers in a barrage of metal and wood.

Given the solitude in which it was written, Midsummer Tideline is a surprisingly sociable album, full of warmth and the vigour of shared creativity, and it adds yet another string to Ian Humberstone’s already impressive bow. 

Music that grows out of in-the-moment self-expression such as this can only ever really sound like itself…The Ancients – Isaiah Collier, William Hooker, William Parker – are here to sort the real space cadets out from the pretenders.

For Matt Hsu, multi-arts all percolate in the making of music, so for the joint release of Noodle and Forest Party, Matt called on comic illustrator Madi Marston to make a comic about Obscure Orchestra. Read it here.