Albums

It feels as if the songs on Constant Follower’s ‘The Smile You Send Out Returns To You’ have been nurtured, perhaps subconsciously, over the two decades it took to realise his musical ambitions, resulting in an incredibly moving and distinctive album.

Julian Taylor’s third solo-credited studio release, Pathways, finds him in a reflective mood and ranks him alongside fellow Canadian folk music luminaries Bruce Cockburn, Leonard Cohen, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and Joni Mitchell.

Featuring two quiet stalwarts of the instrumental scene, American fiddle player Mike Gangloff and British fingerstyle guitar ace C Joynes, the music of ‘Tom Winter, Tom Spring’ is fluid and confident, balancing dense intensity with lighter foot-tappers and spacious abstracts. It’s quite a thing.

Jake Blount & Mali Obomsawin’s Symbiont is a magical fusion of natural beauty, fragility, turbulence and ever-evolving motion. It is awe-inspiring, a ball of chance and wonder, much like the planet Earth.

Three Cane Whale always fill their recordings with splendid arrangements and Hibernacula is no exception. Recorded in Bristol’s prized St George’s venue by Rob Harbron, it is their most accomplished work to date and the freest representation of their sound thus far. Wonderful.

Jon Boden & The Remnant Kings’ Parlour Ballads shines a light on an unfairly neglected part of musical history–a collection of beautifully performed, sad and compassionate songs brought to life by one of folk music’s premier performers.

Featuring Julie Fowlis, Ewen Henderson, the late Simon Emmerson, and more, the musicianship across Highlands is consistently first-rate, and every song is a complete delight. It’s many sublime moments more than warrants listening to, in or out of the Lush Spa.

Through OPHELIA, Angeline Morrison conjures a perfect, otherworldly landscape of hauntological folk music…imagine if Broadcast’s Trish Keenan had been kidnapped at birth by the Copper family and raised on a diet of Angela Carter’s fairy tales…

Featuring the VOX Sydney Philharmonia Choir, and recorded in a nineteenth century Gothic church in Sydney, The Undreamt-of Centre is Laurence Pike’s defining achievement, a work that both glorifies the past and haunts the contemporary.

Scottish singer Kate Young’s solo debut Umbelliferæ is an album full of ambition, but Young never lets that ambition blind her to the importance of her message or the sheer delight of her songcraft. Umbelliferæ is the work of years: a wise, joyous epic.

John Patrick Elliott is an expert when it comes to making seemingly disharmonious concepts and radically disparate musical ideas work together, and My Role in the Show is the most perfectly realised example of that talent in his distinguished career.

Lea Thomas’s “Cosmos Forever” follows an expansive and timeless pathway, allowing her to incorporate broader influences while maintaining the essence of what great music is all about.