Albums

The Ledger is a traditional folk song album par-excellence and a work of great distinction. Recommended to anyone who appreciates top-quality music delivered by very fine musicians.

Good Times Older is a winner on many fronts but it also gives us some idea of just how gifted Jack Sharp is as a singer and interpreter of song. We can only hope that his foray into the world of traditional music continues.

Home Waters is Sam Carter’s finest and most confident piece of work so far and best displays the honed talents of this valuable musician. A concise, cohesive and self-assured album that perfectly balances and blends ace song-writing with considered and finely judged arrangements. A must-have.

An album that ranks up there with Springsteen’s The Ghost of Tom Joad in its vision of a world bereft of hope… Bostick has tapped into the zeitgeist with a songbook of the times worthy of Steinbeck and Guthrie.

Dan Whitehouse’s Dreamland Tomorrow offers two musically contrasting albums, but both consummate expressions of a master craftsman and wordsmith at the peak of his prowess. It is an album deserving of wide commercial success.

Sins We Made is the sophomore outing by Canadian duo Harrow Fair which blasts out of the starting gate. It’s a truly terrific album, indulge in the sins they’ve made, and listen and repent at listening leisure.

On Bloom Innocent – Acoustic, Fink moves beyond the limitations of any particular genre, developing new methods of communication. Blending the electronic and the acoustic worlds is no easy task yet Fin Greenall and company seem to have seamlessly mastered the task.

Don’t Let The Bastards Get You Down Brett Newski tells us, as he looks at the world through eyes jaded by years of disappointment and lies.

Shelby Lynne mines the depths of her consciousness to examine what is real in her relationships. The truth is on display. Listen and you can hear exactly how it plays out in her life, the good, the bad, the unexplainable.

A soundtrack for inner landscapes, Nightwater exists in a world we never expected to enter. While we struggle with new realities Gabriel Birnbaum allows us to explore a never neverland of the everyday. What we see depends on where we look. Examine carefully.

iyatraQuartet’s music is a timely reminder of that all-important link between people and their art, and Break The Dawn exists as a complex, stunningly-performed artefact that offers a little hope in dark times.

Tom Kitching’s latest album ‘Seasons of Change’ is accompanied by his book of the same name in which he shares his experiences of busking around England – a book that shows whatever the situation, this England is so full of life, accompanied by an album of music that is as equally full.