Albums

Buck Curran’s ‘One Evening and Other Folk Songs’ is an album of hidden depths. His talent is an alchemical one: seemingly quotidian musical ingredients are turned into rare metals in his hands, and with this eclectic but hugely talented band, the results are doubly impressive.

Jason McNiff has always written music on his terms; this is especially evident on Everything’s A Song. He has once again delivered an album of the finest contemporary roots music; it’s another absolute gem.

Eric Chenaux’s recent solo offerings offered a strange and beautiful alchemy quite unlike anything else in popular music. Delights of My Life is a continuation of that magic formula but with a more collaborative focus. Chenaux’s spellbinding run of form shows no signs of stopping.

Joshua Massad & Dylan Aycock’s Two Improvisations is absolutely fascinating music that is as mercurial as it is rhythmic and steady. Imagine Ry Cooder and Vishwa Mohan Bhatt’s A Meeting by the River with the experimental knob turned right up and you’ll get close. Spellbinding.

Like the album’s title, Ora Cogan’s gift is her formlessness: her absolute refusal to bow to convention, as she tirelessly shifts and strives for something bigger – something we never expected.

There is an intimacy to the music of Samana that one rarely hears today and on their self-titled LP the music haunts your inner reaches, overflowing with ideas and alchemy.

Paul Armfield’s Trees is an arboreal delight, commissioned by Gift To Nature, the songs give a unique voice to the different trees that grow on Sibden Hill in Shanklin on the Isle of Wight.

Sealladh highlights Rachel Newton’s gift for subsuming visual reference points within a musical purview, coming up with melodies that are disarming, deceptively simple and utterly beautiful.

Live in Kyoto captures the energy and inspired playing that typically infuses a Lúnasa gig, with the sparkling sound of their unique combination of instruments, and the added freshness of great tunes that are not so familiar.

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.