Albums

Essentially 70s shaded pop-rock with a touch of Americana, Carry Illinois’ Alabaster is filled with bright music, but the lyrics not always so. There’s enough here to provide a solid foundation on which to build.

This Is The Kit is back with her new album Bashed Out joined by her regulars as well as collaborators including both Desnner and his brother, Bryce, Beirut’s Benjamin Lanz and Matt Barrick from The Walkmen. The quality of the music and her craft are unmistakable.

With a little help from Sam Lakeman and Boo Hewerdine, The Changing Room’s debut Behind The Lace proves a brilliant tribute to the sun, sea and salt air of the Cornish southwest. It is one of those delightful little gems, one you should all seek out.

With each successive work Spiro seem to get better, as the hours playing with and for each other have their effect. Intense, calming, complex, minimal, meditative and playful the Spiro machine whirs into majestic life to Welcome Joy Welcome Sorrow drawing its fuel from the life to be lived.

On the Demon Barbers latest offering a bewildering array of styles is woven into the pieces, as traditional folk songs are reinterpreted with a contemporary dance music twist. Overlaid by Damien Barber’s powerful, passionate vocal, it all results in a stunning collection of foot-tapping brilliance.

The Lilac Time release their Ninth Album ‘No Sad Songs’, an album that is charged with an uplifting, buoyant vision of life. Given its April release, a quote TS Eliot quote fromThe Waste Land seems appropriate – “ breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.” Go gather.

Karl Culley’s fourth offering is, as the name suggests, a stripped-down affair but his clever, intricate guitar picking creates the illusion that there is more than simply the singer and his guitar.

Rural Music is a collection of songs that exudes contentment. Absorbing lyrics, eloquent story-telling and a thoroughly engaging sound create enough sunshine to thaw those snowy hilltops. Seek out this album from Ash Hunter , and get your summer off to a good start. You won’t regret it.

Although not well known outside of their North East London stomping grounds, The Persecuted have the potential to attract far wider audiences already tuned in to the likes of Turner, Chris T-T and Beans On Toast.

With Charms Against Sorrow, Hannah Sanders places a wide range of traditional songs in a contemporary folk setting and in the process enables the listener to experience them in a new light on this finely-crafted and beautifully realised debut record.

Bella Hardy’s seventh studio album ‘With The Dawn’ contains originals that deftly bridges new and old, forging new links between the two without forgetting the importance of the song, another feather in the cap for an award winning artist.

These new editions are both handsome and pretty much definitive, and likely the most desirable ones to have residing permanently in your Tyrannosaurus Rex collection.