Albums

Jake Blount’s “Single-Footing Horse” has him coming full circle, returning to the old-time mountain music played by Appalachian string bands that first nurtured him. It’s a joyous and technically brilliant batch of tunes, every bit as potent – and, in a way, just as experimental – as his earlier forays into afrofuturism.

The Owl Service’s “Tied to the Land” is their first album in a decade, a lineup change bringing Dorothy Chappell and Rebecca Lievers alongside bandleader Steven Collins for a joyous rendering of traditional songs, instrumentals and an adaptation of a Cornish folk tale. It’s a potent brew that supercharges the album’s 10-year-overnight success.

Charlie Parr’s “Rooming House” is a seven-song suite that follows John, who inherits a boarding house and rents rooms to those on the poverty line. Opening track “Duluth 1964” drops us into unthinkable trauma, and the title track’s quiet meal scene turns into a real gut-punch. Twenty albums into a celebrated career, Parr may have delivered his masterpiece.

Scott Cook’s “Troubadourly Yours” is his eighth album, six years in the making, deeply autobiographical, and echoing the spirit of Woody Guthrie. Recorded in Edmonton, it moves from union solidarity to family history and from a critique of consumerism to a call for inclusivity and embracing diversity – this truly is a brilliant sign-off of the times.

Myles na gCopaleen’s An Béal Bocht sets out Irish identity as a series of gaps between expectation and reality. Trá Pháidín recognise that those gaps still exist, detect the places where they are widening, and – quite brilliantly – attempt to draw them together with a keen ear for the absurd and an impressive mastery of musical forms old and new, one that includes avant jazz, krautrock, and modern composition.

Northern Earth feels like a real distillation of Dean McPhee’s sound; the music shows meticulous attention to detail, and recording it live with no overdubs makes it all the more impressive. A real sense of life and energy flows through each mercurial, exploratory piece. It is complex, painstakingly crafted music that is also focused and assured. It comes highly recommended.

It’s foolish to attempt to situate Sourdure’s music within a historical context; it feels both pre- and post-everything. Sung in Occitan and French, his latest offering, Outredore, features Lisà Langlois, Le Diable Dégoutant, and Eloïse Decazes. It is an absolute singular album that floats freely and pierces deeply.

Elanor Moss talks us through every track on her debut album “The Knife, The Needle,” out now on Merge Records. She traces “Fixer” from a single sitting at her kitchen table, the tape malfunction that reshaped “Improvisation,” and the George Saunders book that guided her to write by intuition until a voice emerged, then following that voice wherever it goes.

“Live at the Chapel” is a twenty-five-minute, four-track teaser from London folk interpreter Charlie Wheatley, the first chapter in a three-part project covering around forty songs. Recorded at Stone Nest, a nineteenth-century Welsh church in London’s West End, the unconventional lineup of guitar, viola and two double basses fills the space with serious ambience. A wonderfully fresh and vibrant EP.

Mary Gauthier’s “Reckoning” strips things down to voice, guitar and occasional harmonica, her rawest album yet, co-produced with Neilson Hubbard and modelled on Springsteen’s Nebraska. Co-written with Jaimee Harris, Ben Roberts and Lori McKenna among others, the songs build around characters who arrive at pivotal moments and face reckonings that define their lives and communities.

Jake Xerxes Fussell’s sixth album, The Old Beloved Path, is his most delicately considered release yet — his most elegant and unassuming. Seemingly easy in nature and quite light for the first few listens, the album then works its magic and its subtlety lingers in the mind: yet more proof Fussell is still only getting better.

Sairie’s long-awaited debut, Beneath the Spreading Tree, sounds like a lo-fi Pentangle with an added layer of hauntological strangeness. The Brighton trio’s lead vocals make songs seem haunted by their own flickering shadows. This ageless-sounding debut is starkly in its beauty and richly rewarding.