Albums

Emma Lucia and Ship Says Om (Jenny Gillespie Mason) talk us through “Djuphjärtad,” their collaborative four-song EP blending Nordic-rooted folk melodies with ambient experimental textures. Using nature-based field recordings, synths, and organic instrumentation, the Bay Area musicians move between intimate songs of romantic anticipation and elemental sound meditations.

Baby Dee’s “Child of Joy” is her first album in 11 years, reworking songs from her catalogue for accordion. Where piano and harp once carried them, the accordion makes them preciously intimate and impossibly vast. Dee is the great chronicler of everyday miracles, written in alphabets of light — the eye of a poet, the hands of a carpenter.

Nick Jonah Davis’s “Rose Delta Rising,” recorded at Black Bay Studio in the Outer Hebrides, pairs electric guitar with Neal Heppleston’s bass, Joe Danks’ drums and Richard Birkin’s strings. This is a very elegant and accomplished set that feels like a distillation of Nick’s work over the years. Musically adventurous, impeccably recorded and performed, it is his best expression yet. Includes the premiere of the “Spoonbill” video.

Patrick ‘Paahto’ Cummins and John Francis Flynn’s debut as Paahto & The Bull, “The 123”, is a guitar duet recording rooted in the Irish traditional canon. No banjo, no fiddle, no percussion — just a fresh, wood-sounding warmth and accomplished playing across ten tracks. A tremendous debut that oozes confidence. This music is in very safe hands.

Laura Veirs’ “Temple Songs” is a set of songs that are personal and immediate, crafted alone in a backyard studio with two microphones and a laptop. Veirs embraces wabi-sabi, welcoming imperfection and the environment seeping into takes. At 29 minutes and 11 songs, so many multitudes are contained within — a recording that chooses truth over gloss.

“Porchlight” is Two Runner’s first album with Paige Anderson as sole frontperson. Its twelve songs encompass transition, loss and journeys both literal and personal. Quality story songs are matched by the beautiful yearning of more intimate numbers — a fine record from a performer with burgeoning talent and an even more promising future.

“Donn Dubh” is a challenging and exhilarating reimagining of Scots Gaelic traditions by two fearless musical cosmonauts at the top of their game. Arun Sood and Angeline Morrison’s collaborative debut calls to mind Eno and Byrne’s “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts” — samples, distortion and elegiac piano channelling folk’s ancient past while forecasting its glittering future.

Spell Songs’ third studio album, In Thin Air, is a creative reaction to Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’s The Book of Birds. Fifteen songs deal with different aspects of avian life, from nest-building to migration, building up a noticeable narrative thrust. Again and again, this album cleverly conflates the lives of birds with human experience. It is an album in constant fluttering movement, one that soars and sings.

On “Black Duck with Elena Setién,” Chicago’s experimental trio team up with Spanish-Basque singer and multi-instrumentalist Elena Setién, recording after just a few hours of rehearsal to capture the direct energy of their live shows. The music shifts from tightly composed to improvised — exciting, adventurous, and full of character. A joy to listen to.

Captured live over a Valentine’s Day weekend in Los Angeles, Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s “Ghosts of American Psychonauts” finds familiar songs dismantled and rearranged by an expanded band. The great trapeze artist of the human experience has eviscerated and recapitulated his own songbook once more — a compelling addition to an ongoing project of self-actualisation.

Hollow Hand deliver a fully harmonious union of folk and indie pop on ‘Wish Road South’, their best album to date. It’s a vibrant record in which you can feel the fun coursing through it, as the zest of a reconfigured and tightly knit group of musicians burns as brightly as the beautifully melodic and unique songs that they’ve forged here.

Marvin Tate’s “Controlled Burn” is a hallucinogenic portal into a world that’s similar to ours, but the furniture is rearranged. Recorded as duo improvisations with longtime collaborator Leroy Bach, then remodelled and refined into the tightest 12 tracks, the method is brave, and the results speak of the angelic geometry of the universe within.