Albums

The alchemy found on ‘hare // hunter // moth // ghost’ is masterful; Kerry Andrew can turn small, rough or difficult things into moments of bright wonder. In You Are Wolf’s hands, transformation is a gift to be celebrated.

It’s often said that lullabies exist in a liminal space, on the ill-defined boundaries between sleep and wakefulness. On this fine album, Abigail Lapell continues to push her own musical boundaries.

Eclectic and electric in equal measure, Dori Freeman’s ‘Do You Recall’ finds her reaffirming her Appalachian roots and looking beyond them, touching on old traditions and creating her own as her star continues to rise.

‘Thea Gilmore’ is an album shaped by personal upheaval, self-reinvention, uncompromising determination and triumphant, empowered rebirth. Like a beacon, it leads the way out of the darkness.

Following Show of Hands’ ‘indefinite break’ announcement, Roots 2, an exemplary best-of collection, looks back at their last 16 years, an incredibly fruitful period shaped by exploration and collaboration.

Carried in Sound is an emotionally evocative album textured musically, vocally and lyrically with shadows and light, like a comforting flickering candle in the depth of darkness and storms; it’s easily the best thing that the Smoke Fairies have ever done.

When things begin to stagnate, the answer is to shake things up, which is what Zach Berkman needed to do on The Heart of. An album that examines that complex dance of human existence, and that endless search for connection.

Joseph Allred’s New Jerusalem shifts between the cosmic and the cosmopolitan and results in a multilayered album that is often intriguingly dense but never far away from a state of euphoria.

On Sweet Revolution, the superb new album from Hannah White, the honesty of her words, music, and voice makes all the hurt within somehow beatific and transformational.

Even among the darkest moments of Kristen Grainger & True North’s ‘Fear of Falling Stars’, there’s a light somewhere on the horizon, bringing you back to listen again and again.

On ‘Look Over the Wall, See the Sky’, John Francis Flynn unropes songs from their historical moorings and lets them barrel downstream…Refreshing and vividly utopian, these songs exist in liberated states that have the feel of radical statements.

On ‘Cat Power Sings Dylan’, the audience’s reaction is an outpouring of love and gratitude deservedly raining down on a timeless set of music and an artist with the depth of understanding, integrity and feeling to pull it off. What a night this must have been.