Albums

Four years on from her Chasing Ghosts debut, the Alabama-born multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter Sylvia Rose Novak returns with a self-produced album that welds the personal and the political.

Orit Shimoni is an excellent teller of tales who should be more widely recognised as she roves around baring her heart. Her latest offering is a nod to her nomadic life.

Freumhan Falaichte is a breathtakingly accomplished album with an incredible line-up including Julie Fowlis, Rosa Cedron, Fraser Fifield, Ewan MacPherson, Natalie Haas and Donald Hay. It’s also an enormously significant album in the Scottish folk scene and for Gaelic music.

After becoming utterly entranced by the CD release of Northern Flyway, it was abundantly clear that the full live production the CD was based on was going to be something special…this multi-dimensional exploration of birdsong, ecology, and folklore casts an even stronger spell.

Hummingbird is Smith’s most impressive album yet. A work of mature and subtle beauty, celebrating songs that are still being sang and ones that will carry on being sang; this album should be heard by everyone.

Always driven to broaden their horizons, each successive album from Breabach has brought something new and innovative to their music, and Frenzy of the Meeting is no exception. Listeners are sure to enjoy the results with an ever increasing sense of wonder.

There is a particular something about Cornish Celtic music that has drawn me in for many years. I am not sure if I can find the right words, but I know that Davey & Dyer have it and the music speaks volumes.

At its most persuasive, Pipes succeeds in involving the receptive listener in a freshly perceived melding of tradition and ambience through an ageless environmental presentation of time-honoured piping technique; the closing pibroch, A Lament For Hope, is probably its most pure and perfect distillation.

It’s often the case that emergent young folk singers start out mining traditional folk roots before sewing their own crop, in reversing the cycle and visiting them directly here…she proves herself very much in command of rather than in thrall to them.

The quality of the musicianship and the sensitive and sympathetic reading of the songs on The Unfinished Violin means that it should rightfully be considered one of the best folk albums of 2018. It’s context and story also suggests it has a good chance of being considered one of the most important too.

Iowa-born Nathan Bell follows up last years’ Love>Fear (48 Hours in Traitorland) with what he refers to as the unexpected fourth in his Family Man trilogy. A writer of songs both deeply personal and universal, long may he continue to toll.

Magic Ship finds Amelia Meath, Alexandra Sauser-Monnig and Molly Sarlé reuniting as Mountain Man. Beguilingly simple, at times childlike at others worldly-wise, Magic Ship is a bewitching album; you should book your passage forthwith.