Albums

Deft, bare, and quietly portentous, Niamh Regan’s second album, “Come As You Are”, is a timely stand against the unprofitable conditions for musicians in Ireland today. It’s also a brutally authentic work from a songwriter of the highest order.

At Fargrounds stops you in your tracks with the sheer excellence of Jacken Elswyth’s playing and then with the breadth of its implications. This is instrumental music that has a lot to say, and it says it with verve, lightness, and great skill.

The rhythms of Anna Tivel’s ‘Living Thing’ ride waves of anxiety, resilience and hope, washing up on a shore that ultimately looks out to the light on the horizon rather than the darkness behind.

Littoral Zone feels like a landmark album in Adam Ross’s career, a kind of synthesis of the most impressive elements of his full band and solo work. In a fair world, this literate, funny, humane album would cement his status as a national treasure.

A kind of alternative history of Gastr Del Sol, whose massive importance to the musical landscape of the last thirty years has been massive, a release as exceptional as ‘We Have Dozens of Titles’ should be met with excitement and the highest praise.

A concept album about the physical and spiritual aspects of birth and parenthood, Carlos Niño & Friends’ “Placenta” is a work of warmth, humanity, and unruly anarchic joy, with Niño acting as a catalyst through which the swell of creativity can be filtered and condensed.

After a six-year hiatus, Old Man Luedecke returns with ‘She Told Me Where To Go’; re-energised and reinvented, this is one of his finest albums to date.

Ned Roberts’ Heavy Summer is a pastoral folk album with gentle Laurel Canyon musical breezes and echoes of Nick Drake, James Taylor, and Tim Hardin…a meditative and quietly absorbing listening experience.

The Burning Hell were so impressed by Nev Clay, one of Newcastle’s best-kept secrets, that Mathias Kom asked to review Nev’s new album, ‘So Little Happened for So Long’ – “It’s my record of the year, and the remainder of 2024 is irrelevant”.

Laura J Martin’s Prepared is her strongest, strangest and most distinctive work yet, and proof that after an eight-year break, good things come to those who wait.

Produced by Jim Moray and featuring several special guests, Out of the Rain is a glorious, re-energised return from Blair Dunlop that should comfortably reinstate him among folk rock’s upper echelons.

Ship to Shore finds Richard Thompson enjoying the most vital of late golden periods, producing work to stand favourably alongside any from his previous fifty years.