Albums

Michael Hurley’s final album, Broken Homes and Gardens, finds him essential form: digressive, surreal, jokey, ultimately moving. A folk prankster with a poet’s soul. A fitting way to cap a thirty-odd album legacy that is as important as practically any songwriter you care to mention. He sounds like he had a whole lot more up his sleeve. He always did. 

John Elliott of The Little Unsaid has a way of drawing listeners in with universal truths presented in the most personal – and often poetic – of ways. On Stay Fragile All Across This Cold Frontier, the album moves from intimate piano ballads to raw blues-rock and stately meditations, confirming The Little Unsaid as one of the best-kept secrets in contemporary music.

M. Sage’s Tender / Wading is a quietly sublime album. It achieves all of the goals of ambient music without being hamstrung by any of its genre tropes. Unafraid to reach into the past, and unafraid of its own big heart, it is textural, varied, consistently interesting and frequently moving.  

On ‘Forgetting Is Violent’, Patrick Shiroishi tackles racism at large, both in the past and from a contemporary standpoint. That his work carries such depth of meaning, even at its most minimal, is a testament to his skill as a composer and musician, but also listener and interpreter of stories. The album is a lightning rod for those stories, a vivid warning from history and a vibrant cri de coeur.

Mystery Park is Kathryn Williams’s 15th studio album and, arguably, her most open and tender in its emotions, delivery and words. René Magritte once said, “Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist”. Williams makes it a walk in the park.

On Baby Man, the latest offering from Fruit Bats, Eric D Johnson strips away the comfort of a full band, forcing a singular focus on his lyrical and melodic introspection, a choice that elevates this album. It stands as an intimate and essential document of an artist reckoning with his past and present, a beautiful and poignant act of vulnerability that ultimately reveals a deep and resonant strength.

The key ingredient of “A Danger to Ourselves” is depth. It is an album of unfathomable musical depths, but perhaps more importantly, it is an album about depth of feeling, the abyss from which desire springs like a liquid flame. Lucrecia Dalt gives herself over completely to exploring this depth, and the singular work of art that emerges is as detailed and as unexpected as any treasure.

His ability to slip unseen from folky pastoralism to improvised experimentation puts Glenn Kimpton at the forefront of the current group of British acoustic guitarists taking their inspiration from foundational American exponents like Robbie Basho and John Fahey. He is in good company with those names, and he doesn’t seem out of place. Small Show is assured and highly rewarding.

The latest in the Ceremonial Counties tape series from Folklore Tapes covers Bedfordshire, tackled by Radiophoric Labs, a hauntological project of unknown provenance who does a compelling job of creating an atmosphere of dreary, post-apocalyptic dread; and Greater London falls to Wooden Tape, the alias of Tim Maycox, a Liverpool art teacher whose focus is the commuter town of Surbiton. They present two very different sides of the hauntological coin.

As with past compilations in this celebrated series, Imaginational Anthem vol. XIV : Ireland is a wonderfully diverse, quietly exciting set of songs. Cian Nugent, Caoimhe Hopkinson, NC Lawlor, Aonghus McEvoy, Junior Brother, Sean Carpio, David Murphy, Brenda Jenkinson, Damian O’Neil, Mark McKowski & Jerome McGlynn all make valuable contributions to a set that is a testament to the versatility of the guitar and an absolute pleasure to listen to.

Big Thief’s Double Infinity was always going to be different. While it’s leaner than their last, its sonic range is wider. It is an album dedicated to corporeal impermanence, and to its flipside: love and its constant presence. It goes without saying that it’s big on ideas. It’s also big on melodic innovation and collaborative spirit. And most importantly, it’s a record with a gigantic heart.

Carson McHone’s third album, Pentimento, is a dense, multi-faceted tapestry, with fragments of poetry, spoken verse, field recordings, pastoral folk, guitar and chamber pop, amply demonstrating the benefits of a more collaborative approach on this audacious gem that also reveals a level of sophistication, demonstrating that there are no real limits to McHone’s ambition.