Albums

Brown Horse’s third album, Total Dive, is a bigger, bolder beast than anything they have attempted before. Snarling guitars and weary pedal steel carry songs steeped in isolation, loss and defiant dark humour, with nods to Neil Young, Jason Molina and Uncle Tupelo running beneath the scuzz. A pinnacle, reached in just three albums.

The Folklore Tapes Ceremonial Counties series continues with Vol.XXII: Tyne and Wear | Somerset. Maryanne Royle’s “The Stone Throat” takes listeners into Newcastle’s Victoria Tunnel, blending social history, hauntology and post-industrial soundscape into one of the series’ most atmospheric pieces. Paddy Steer’s “Swerving Coach” is its perfect foil — a fidgety, fascinating folly from Somerset’s most haunted corners.

Wendy Eisenberg’s self-titled new album is a distinct departure — gorgeously orchestrated baroque folk-rock of remarkable maturity and complexity. With lush string arrangements from co-producer mari rubio (more eaze) adding warmth and depth throughout, these ten exquisite songs trace a fine line between agonised self-examination and celebration. It’s the kind of album that scratches an itch you didn’t know you had.

Mixed and mastered by Jim O’Rourke, Tommy Peltier’s “Echo Park (The 70’s Sessions)” catches the moment a jazz lifer reinvented himself as a songwriter in 1970s Los Angeles. Recorded in a hillside house near Echo Park Lane, these eleven tracks brim with melodic invention — each could be convincingly sold as a long-forgotten seventies hit. Out now via Drag City.

Shelter, the new album from Chaz Prymek (aka Lake Mary) and Matthew Sage, is a rather beautiful, unhurried recording built from live improvisations in a pole barn studio, delicately adorned with sparse overdubs. The music is intricate and spacious, very elegantly performed and balanced — the sound of musicians who love expression through sound and the environment they call home.

Durham, NC quartet Sluice release Companion, their third album and Mtn Laurel Recording Co. debut, on March 27th. Recorded at Sylvan Esso’s studio Betty’s and tended over two years, the album finds frontman Justin Morris reckoning with disillusionment, a violent robbery, and the long road back to music — framing companionship, in love and in community, as worth the struggle.

Joshua Abrams’ Music For Pulse Meridian Foliation is a single, thirty-five-minute swathe of all-enveloping, slow-moving minimalism. Originally a score for Lisa Alvarado’s multidisciplinary installation at REDCAT, CalArts, the album tracks a semi-fluid path, advancing like cooling lava — a matrix of abundant and not always predictable intersections, there to be explored, to inspire fierce thought, but also to luxuriate in or meditate on.

Sam Grassie’s debut album, “Where Two Hawks Fly”, arrives after years of adversity — life-threatening injury, debilitating illness and personal tragedy — and sounds all the more remarkable for it. His guitar playing is deft and unshowy, worthy of hero Bert Jansch, while collaborators help shape something deeply assured, generous and communal.

Plankton Wat’s “The Vanishing World” is a belter – a love letter to the era of the big studio album. James Shaver’s killer bass lines power mercurial instrumentals, while drummer Dustin Dybvig and trumpeter Victor Nash inject pure joy. At times high-octane, at others low-key and sparse, the creativity on show is hugely satisfying.

On “sentence structure in the country,” more eaze leans into her love of song and embraces her upbringing as a folk-oriented fiddle player. Collaboration is key, with Wendy Eisenberg and others helping shape an album where trademark contrasts feel more subtle and fluid than ever. A bewildering array of influences leveraged into a sustained, emotionally resonant and surprisingly compact work of art.

Spencer Cullum finds comfort in retellings of folk narratives that seek to make sense of the present day. With Spencer Cullum’s Coin Collection 3, he’s provided a richly satisfying conclusion to his trilogy of albums. Born from a need to reconnect with the place that shaped him, the trilogy has also become a platform for the generous, collaborative spirit of the Nashville community he now calls home.

Many of the songs on Joshua Burnside’s “It’s Not Going to Be Okay” can disarm you or take your breath away from their very first lines. Burnside is the most consistently human and the most surprising of songwriters. Details spring out at you like spiders from the cracks between floorboards. Meteors and energy-efficient light bulbs, blackbirds and bears, spaceships and Peugeots. The profound and the quotidian occupy the same arena.