Albums

Jim Ghedi’s ‘Wasteland’, for all its anger and anguish, provides us with many moments of beauty. It is a timely reminder of the potency of art in a world that seems to be turning uglier by the day, and it might just be Ghedi’s masterpiece.

Park Jiha is a master of creating conceptual soundscapes, and ‘All Living Things’ is humbling, enchanting and sometimes quietly alarming in the starkness of its structure. It is a beautiful, inimitable creation.

With poetic touchstones that range from the metaphysical and Shakespeare to Dickinson, Plath and Auden, Polly Paulusma’s Wildfires is unquestionably her masterpiece, which, like the title, burns and blazes, forged alike in the anguish and euphoria of love and life.

Acoustic guitar badass and prolific tourer Liam Grant’s ‘Prodigal Son’ comes in like a thunderstorm, with distorted fingerpicked guitar notes hitting the speakers in a barrage of metal and wood.

Given the solitude in which it was written, Midsummer Tideline is a surprisingly sociable album, full of warmth and the vigour of shared creativity, and it adds yet another string to Ian Humberstone’s already impressive bow. 

Music that grows out of in-the-moment self-expression such as this can only ever really sound like itself…The Ancients – Isaiah Collier, William Hooker, William Parker – are here to sort the real space cadets out from the pretenders.

For Matt Hsu, multi-arts all percolate in the making of music, so for the joint release of Noodle and Forest Party, Matt called on comic illustrator Madi Marston to make a comic about Obscure Orchestra. Read it here.

Kinetic is the latest album from Belgium’s five-piece hybrid jazz combo Black Flower – a call to dance through life’s chaos and to harness the power of movement as a tool for liberation. Listen to Monkey System, also our Song of the Day.

In an age of ‘homogenisation and mass amnesia’, Cynefin’s ‘Shimli’ looks to the diversity of the past for answers, a role he’s well placed to comment on as a researcher and cultural historian. Beautifully presented, it is another remarkable release from this unique musician.

With their retro-sounding harmonies, there is an attractive nostalgia to The Ocelots’ new album, Everything, When Said Slowly. It’s a bittersweet, anthemic affair and a joy to listen to, with a salient groove lifting the whole thing ever so slightly—a haunting and majestic album.

The music Seth Lakeman makes and the passion with which he makes it has never faltered; The Granite Way is another exemplary reason why he’s the benchmark of contemporary English folk music.

Nadia Reid’s ‘Enter Now Brightness’ is an album unfettered by generic pigeonholes and working in complete service to artistic expression. Alongside moments of reflection and introspection, we witness joy, light and a piercing optimism that ruptures this album with vibrant colour.