Albums

Topette!!’s debut album C’est Le Pompon is one that should be on all your radars. It’s all here, beautifully whipped up and raring to go – a wonderful melange of French, English, and all points East, West, North and South.

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 Burning Hell’s ‘Revival Beach’ is about the end of everything. But it is no less wise, funny or musically assured than its predecessor Public Library (easily one of the best records of 2016). Kom’s writing is a breath of fresh air, and I can think of few songwriters I’d rather spend the apocalypse with.

Some outstanding young musicians have emerged from the Dublin folk scene over the last couple of years and this second album from The Jeremiahs shows they’ve earned their place alongside the likes of Lankum and Daoiri Farrell.

On Laissez Passer, TootArd, a young, trailblazing band from the Golan Heights, show that the direst of circumstances can produce inspiring and uplifting music that will open up your mind and make you move your feet.

As he so ably demonstrates on ‘Carry Fire’, Robert Plant is a musical traveller, still on the journey stopping off where the music takes him. With American blues still at the core, the music also spans the continents taking in Africa, Asia and European themes. Long may the fire he carries burn ever brighter…

The latest offering from Don Merckle offers a short but highly effective and, for many, resonant portrait of the experiences and feelings of those called to do their duty and for whom war seemed to offer the only escape from hard times.

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.

LOWP are a folk band from the North East of England, formed in late 2009. Their music is drawn from Tyneside, Durham and Northumberland, and has a quality that is unique to that area, a meeting of Scottish and English but suffused with its own vitality and its distinctive accents.

This has-to-be-definitive reissue of Pearls Before Swine’s of One Nation Underground is something of a benchmark. The sturdily-packaged CD edition is sure built to last; it sports full lyric sheet and new notes giving a historical perspective from both Rapp and Alderson.

On his first entirely self-composed Irish folk album ‘Sharing a Song’, Eddie Sheehan enlists the help of, amongst others, Dirk Powell and Mike McGoldrick. The songs are personal and unpretentious but also to reflect the fallibility that goes with being human.

Wild & Reckless was born from the stage production that Blitzen Trapper spent the better part of a year producing….a terrific album. “The wind don’t always blow and the sun don’t always shine”, sings Earley on the closing track, but the weather report here is just fine.