Three albums to take for a spin

It is, apparently, Spotify Wrapped season again, when our favourite multi-billion, poorly paying, exploitative, military-AI investing music streaming service tells us what it has spent the year telling us to listen to.

Listening to music and finding new music should be an active process, fed by word of mouth recommendations, a song heard on the radio, a band seen at a gig. An exciting one. Spotify makes it, for the most part, a passive process whereby an algorithm spoon-feeds us songs by artists who, with some exceptions, earn a pittance from us listening to their work.

I don't have Spotify - I never grew out of buying songs for my ipod on itunes, although I now buy one album a month (roughly the same amount as a Spotify subscription) on Bandcamp. So, instead of a Spotify Wrapped, I thought I'd share three albums I have really enjoyed this year. Links to buy music directly from the artist via Bandcamp are included within the post.

1) Teeth of Time - Joshua Burnside

© Joshua Burnside

 A friend at work recommended this to me and it's a genuine I-remember-exactly-where-I-was-when-I-first-heard-it record. From the opening thirty seconds I was hooked, pulled into a world where traditional folk merges with ambient sound, field recordings, themes of new fatherhood, the climate crisis and Irish identity in the most strangely beautiful way. I think I listened to Joshua Burnside and nothing else for about a month afterwards.

Standout track: Sycamore Queen

Buy it here

2) Howl - Daisy Rickman

© Daisy Rickman - she painted the album art too

I love this record by musician and artist Daisy Rickman. Howl is Cornish for sun and this is an album of sunrises, sunsets, solstices. The instrumentation - which includes guitar, 12 string, drums, double bass, cello, banjo, accordion and more - was all played by Rickman herself and combines with her distinctive, haunting vocals to create a folk album that is highly atmospheric and which goes to unexpected places. One to play on loop.

Standout track: Falling Through the Rising Sun

Buy it here

3) Ness - Hayden Thorpe

© Hayden Thorpe/Domino Records

I'm a fan of the band Wild Beasts. I'm a fan of the writer Robert Macfarlane. Therefore I was always going to be a fan of this record, which sees the band's singer Hayden Thorpe adapt Macfarlane's prose poem Ness into an album that is hard to categorise. It combines Macfarlane's words, Thorpe's operatic vocals, oboes, guitar riffs, seagulls, the Green Chapel, fungi, military testing sites and tidal drift. It feels like it shouldn't work but it does, both as a kind of musical adaption of the poem but also as a collection of brilliant songs too.

Standout track: Closer Away

Buy it here