Albums

A rising star in today’s Americana folk constellation, Jack Schneider’s Best Be On My Way is an engaging, musically understated, but highly accomplished debut that touches on universal emotions, often downcast but glimmering with shafts of light.

Featuring a host of special guests, Mike Vass’s Decemberwell Decade is a tour de force. Don’t wait to add it to your Christmas list, you’d then miss out on the best possible month to be listening to this inescapably December music.

For their latest album ‘Tri’, Welsh trio Plu broadened their soundstage, bringing a beautiful nuanced depth to their music. It’s an understated joy and one of the best albums I’ve heard this year.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise – despite Stick in the Wheel’s fearsome, uncompromising and unashamedly experimental attitude to folk music; the live recordings featured on Endurance Soundly Caged prove that they can still engage with listeners on the most visceral of levels.

While tackling difficult subjects, Jeb Loy Nichols’s ‘The United States Of The Broken Hearted’ is ultimately a soother; he never loses sight of the restorative beauty in music and hope found in basic person-to-person interaction; these are things which still make life worth living.

Like Pissaro’s painting from which ‘Late Afternoon in the Meadow’ takes its name, Joshua Burnside pairs together opposing imagery, offsetting the life-affirming and sacred with the crushingly bleak and mundane.

With ‘It’s Been A While, Buddy’, Ríoghnach Connolly & Honeyfeet continue their unique journey, sharing dollops of theatrical fun amongst more honest, personal, heartfelt lyrics, whilst always inhabiting a sprawling terrain of musical forms.

‘You Will Not Die’ finds Darren Hayman at his most withdrawn and introspective, uncovering new truths hidden in well-worn themes…when a songwriter of Hayman’s skill turns the spotlight back on himself – and in doing so creates a new world in miniature scale – it’s worth taking note.

Sun Ra Arkestra’s ‘Living Sky’ is so sublime, this is music to bathe in and soak it up as the intricacies and delicacies of the many layers of detail slowly unfold and shower the listener in pure interplanetary wonder.

You, Golden, the first duo record from Owen Spafford and Louis Campbell, was always one to look forward to. Uplifting, probing and exciting, as well as wise and patient, it is an album to return to and savour. Excellent stuff.

As beautiful and powerful as an electrical storm, Daniel Bachman’s Almanac Behind hones his new sound into a lean and precise tapestry. It is an extraordinary achievement by a unique artist. My album of the year.

On ‘While I Sit and Watch This Tree Volume 2’, Lizabett Russo takes the listener on a very personal journey. It’s a stunning and passionate album, one that you will be drawn back to repeatedly.