Featured Albums of the Month

What Sam Carter and Jim Moray have created with Harmonograph is fittingly detailed, truly collaborative, varied and often beautiful. It is the work of two modern masters in perfect harmony. In the world of folk and roots music, collaborations don’t get much bigger and better than this.

We Are The Wildlife, the solo debut of Brona McVittie whose name has been cropping up more and more frequently in the more expansive and experimental subsets of the folk music world. This is one of the most distinctive debuts you are likely to hear all year.

The most arresting and impressive aspects of Sanctuary are not the message and the direction the music is coming from – it’s the music itself. The writing and musicianship shine in what is easily Ross Ainslie’s most impressive album so far.

Avenging & Bright, a crossover between folk, pop and electronica, is bursting with confidence, and rightly so. Once again Damien O’Kane has recorded an album so highly polished it shines, it dazzles. Read our review and watch his new video for Poor Stranger.

Providing more energy than a tanker full of Lucozade, 25 years on the Peatbog Faeries sound every bit as fresh and, above all, enthusiastic as they did when they headed out from Skye all those years ago. Live@25 is an exceptional live album by an exceptional live band.

On ‘Singing Ways to Feel More Junior’, Luke Daniels delivers yet another highly innovative collection. An album that is full of fascinating and meticulously crafted song from an artist with his finger on the pulse. Out Now on Gael Music.

The beauty and importance of this album lies partly in the fact that O’Hooley and Tidow recognise that an appreciation of this time of year – whether you want to call it Christmastime or not – is based on both personal and universal factors. This is an album of frosted beauty with a heart as warm as a coal fire.

The Melrose Quartet embody the kind of collaborative spirit and socially aware stance that makes folk music such an interesting, challenging and continually relevant form. As demonstrated on Dominion, they have prospered by seizing the day, by daring to do things that are slightly different…who are able to make old songs sound new, and new ones sound timeless.

With Midnight Milk, Adam Holmes demonstrates his willingness to mine the rich creativity behind his work and bring to the surface previously unimagined gems. Adam Holmes and the Embers have created an album that digs deep into the soul and finds it a place of calm comfort.

With Dead Man’s Dance (Dawns y Gŵr Marw) ALAW have not only created an impressive follow up to their 2013 debut, they’ve surpassed the brilliance of Melody with an even more invigorating, wider-ranging exploration of Welsh poetic and musical traditions. It is an inspired and unique album.

Bob Delyn a’r Ebillion return with their first album in fourteen years. Twm Morys and his band offer melodic inventiveness and lyrical panache on Dal i ‘Redig Dipyn Bach which summons images of the slate and moss of the Welsh landscape and lays bare the Welsh psyche. It is an impressive and moving piece of songwriting, in any language.

With his fourth studio album The Water Of Leith released this month, Blue Rose Code continues to draw on his increasingly inventive ability, as he quietly weaves flavours from a range of musical influences and personal experience, to produce his most thoroughly absorbing album to date.