Albums

Shelter, the new album from Chaz Prymek (aka Lake Mary) and Matthew Sage, is a rather beautiful, unhurried recording built from live improvisations in a pole barn studio, delicately adorned with sparse overdubs. The music is intricate and spacious, very elegantly performed and balanced — the sound of musicians who love expression through sound and the environment they call home.

Durham, NC quartet Sluice release Companion, their third album and Mtn Laurel Recording Co. debut, on March 27th. Recorded at Sylvan Esso’s studio Betty’s and tended over two years, the album finds frontman Justin Morris reckoning with disillusionment, a violent robbery, and the long road back to music — framing companionship, in love and in community, as worth the struggle.

Joshua Abrams’ Music For Pulse Meridian Foliation is a single, thirty-five-minute swathe of all-enveloping, slow-moving minimalism. Originally a score for Lisa Alvarado’s multidisciplinary installation at REDCAT, CalArts, the album tracks a semi-fluid path, advancing like cooling lava — a matrix of abundant and not always predictable intersections, there to be explored, to inspire fierce thought, but also to luxuriate in or meditate on.

Sam Grassie’s debut album, “Where Two Hawks Fly”, arrives after years of adversity — life-threatening injury, debilitating illness and personal tragedy — and sounds all the more remarkable for it. His guitar playing is deft and unshowy, worthy of hero Bert Jansch, while collaborators help shape something deeply assured, generous and communal.

Plankton Wat’s “The Vanishing World” is a belter – a love letter to the era of the big studio album. James Shaver’s killer bass lines power mercurial instrumentals, while drummer Dustin Dybvig and trumpeter Victor Nash inject pure joy. At times high-octane, at others low-key and sparse, the creativity on show is hugely satisfying.

On “sentence structure in the country,” more eaze leans into her love of song and embraces her upbringing as a folk-oriented fiddle player. Collaboration is key, with Wendy Eisenberg and others helping shape an album where trademark contrasts feel more subtle and fluid than ever. A bewildering array of influences leveraged into a sustained, emotionally resonant and surprisingly compact work of art.

Spencer Cullum finds comfort in retellings of folk narratives that seek to make sense of the present day. With Spencer Cullum’s Coin Collection 3, he’s provided a richly satisfying conclusion to his trilogy of albums. Born from a need to reconnect with the place that shaped him, the trilogy has also become a platform for the generous, collaborative spirit of the Nashville community he now calls home.

Many of the songs on Joshua Burnside’s “It’s Not Going to Be Okay” can disarm you or take your breath away from their very first lines. Burnside is the most consistently human and the most surprising of songwriters. Details spring out at you like spiders from the cracks between floorboards. Meteors and energy-efficient light bulbs, blackbirds and bears, spaceships and Peugeots. The profound and the quotidian occupy the same arena.

It is more in-your-face than much of their recent work, thematically if not musically. More engaged and more engaging. The sound of a band alive to the changing world with all its problems and all its wonder. News from Planet Zombie is another important dispatch from the Notwist’s entirely unique corner of the musical world, an album full of closely-observed detail that warrants rapt attention.

Bill Orcutt follows up the celebrated “Music for Four Guitars” with “Music in Continuous Motion,” his second studio album for four guitars. If anything, Music in Continuous Motion is a more enjoyable album, with soulful compositions working alongside the gnarlier playing. A fully realised and finely honed set by a master of experimental guitar, this is unmissable. Bring on the live shows.

The latest in the Folklore Tapes Ceremonial Counties series pairs AHRKH — the solo venture of Gnod’s A P Macarte — with Scottish/Turkish singer and sound artist Bell Lungs. Macarte delivers a satisfying slab of arhythmic, amelodic drone inspired by the Isle of Wight’s Mottistone longstone, while Bell Lungs weaves an extraordinary fifteen-minute folk opera from the cursed legend of Raggedstone Hill.

Canadian songwriter Cat Clyde comes flying in like a midnight courier, express‑delivering through Concord Records the most intimate dispatches of her life. Mud Blood Bone crackles with urgency even as Cat bares her soul. It is her most personal record yet and also her most electrifying, a pulse‑quickening rush, wrapped in confession.