Albums

Claude Martin was a young and talented fiddle player who had been performing traditional old-time fiddle music in the Washington DC area for over 20 years. This album both serves as a showcase for a gifted musician and a memorial for a young life taken far too soon.

Jason McNiff’s been gathering increasing acclaim since he made his debut and it’s long overdue for that to be matched by greater  commercial success. With the label behind him, Joy and Independence might just be the one to crack the ceiling.

Cherry-picked from two decades of output, this is a varied collection of consistently high quality. Listeners hankering for an echo of that sly Mr Fox (genuinely weird and wonderful) will find delight in the 70s composition, Fiddler’s Cross.

There’s a quiet, easy charm about Alden Patterson & Dashwood’s distinctive little musical niche, yet its very simplicity of execution is deceptive, for it can conceal an inventiveness and sense of challenge that I find every bit as beguiling.

A magnificent celebration of the achievements of Fellside Recordings, a marvellous collection of life-affirming music that (together with its predecessor-companion issues) richly deserves a place on your “dip into often” shelves.

On Banjophony, there’s a connectivity among the musicians that goes far beyond simply sharing a melody; it’s an exchange of ideas and influences and a platform to explore them. O’Kane and Block have taken a collective approach to create an album of incredibly captivating music.

This collaboration between Laura Marling and Mike Lindsay should be recorded as one of the most important and necessary works of this decade.

Described as a modern-day hippie-spiritual, the latest offering from Israel Nash is expansive and intimate, personal and universal, spawned of despair but fuelled by hope, it flies on a  higher plane. Book a seat.

The Morning Star seems like a giant leap forward into the experimental mind of Bachman. It’s an album with a sharp tongue and among the beauty that shines through is plenty of unrest, unease and anger. It makes for powerful and original music and ends on a finale that will probably blow your mind.

As an instrument sounding a clarion call for self-awareness and awakening in a divisive world, Gilkyson is finely tuned and Secularia a career-defining musical apotheosis.

While the songs are described as brutal in emotional suggestion, it’s Faraone’s disarming confessional tones and the overall, cumulative lo-fi and often shimmering folk beauty that draws you in and keeps you in its arms.

Turas 1980 is to be heartily welcomed, and not just as the only available, live recording of a band at the first peak of their development. It’s a recording of a concert that transports you there, it’s as close as you’ll get to having been there on the night.