Albums

The strongly individual blend of instrumental colours continues, all surfacing through the texture in various delightful and surprising permutations over the course of this 40th Anniversary (Two-Score) album from Blowzabella.

Norwich-based nine-piece The Vagaband return this month with a new album – Something Wicked This Way Comes. While there’s a mass of fine influences at play beneath the surface, their feet are planted firmly in British roots rock soil. Wickedly good.

Morning Haikus, Afternoon Ragas is an album of poetry in guitar music. The space around Buck Curran’s music allows it to grow and change, to become part of the landscape yet also allows you to become part of it as well. Join in.

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.