Albums

While it’s unfair to single out any one band to carry forward the torch that Planxty lit all those years ago, the music Pat Broaders, Liz Knowles and Kieran O’Hare are making can certainly hold its head high in such exalted company. The Joyful Hour gives out its joy in abundance and deserves a place in anyone’s collection.

Part 2 of the Bert Jansch reissue, A Man I’d Rather Be from Earth Recordings covers four albums and a journey across 6 years, that takes Bert from style to style and from strength to strength.

On An Introduction to The Watersons and Waterson:Carthy, Topic records cover a 40 year period within 15 songs – a superb and timely retrospective of a vital shaping force in contemporary British folk. A collective musical vision of exhilarating purity, beauty, and power.

Abbey Wood is an unmitigated triumph. Clever and heartfelt, it inverts folk tropes by presenting historical narratives in extremely personal ways or by creating finely-observed urban backgrounds where the more personal songs can play out. Hayter’s haunted, haunting voice holds it all together and makes it fabulously unique.

For his seventh album, Thousand Springs, East Nashvillian Korby Lenker decided to skip the studio altogether and head to his home state of Idaho to record in places that held particular meaning for him. It’s all the richer for it.

The Rheingans Sisters’ powers of songwriting and arranging have reached a new peak, they have become one of the most formidably talented duos around. In Bright Field, they have created an album bursting with worldly joys and shot through with intimate sorrow and wisdom.

Over the years, Leger’s been gradually establishing himself as a figure of note in the Canadian music scene, this album finds him ready to take on far wider horizons.

Winner of International Artist of the Year at the 2018 UK Americana Awards, Courtney Marie Andrews’ follow up to ‘Honest Life’ has arrived with high expectations. From the opening of ‘May Your Kindness Remain’, there’s no doubt that expectations have not only been met but also surpassed.

Dungeness provides further persuasive evidence of Trembling Bells’s ever-broadening evolutionary (and revolutionary) scope of their music. They are still very much a force to be reckoned with, of that let me leave you in no doubt.

Kathryn Roberts and Sean Lakeman have steadily grown in reputation and admiration and they have reached a peak with Personae, a fine and accessible album on the surface but built on firm foundations of skilful songwriting, world-class arrangements and performances underneath.

What is so impressive about this release is the level of immersive intimacy that the quintet achieves in a live setting. Only the audience appreciation at the end of each track reminds you that they aren’t playing just for you. This is music deeply rooted in its time and in its space yet played without borders – and it’s all the better for it.

While Alasdair Roberts throws a curve ball with the arrangements on his latest offering, aided by Amble Skuse & David McGuinness he places vocals and song firmly in the foreground. What News offers a set of minimalist music and vocal clarity that is starkly beautiful in all its boldness.