My father reckoned that to call something alright, was the highest praise possible, as in all is right, rather than the fainter kudos it has come to signify. I would say everything’s fine, the statement, smacks of the selfsame schizophrenic duality. Which was Lewis’s intent.

If you miss the slightly bruised flavours of John Prine, this should be right up your street. Lewis is a Nashville resident, quietly honing his craft, with a handful of solo releases behind him, as well as collaborative efforts, such as the 3-way project, 2021’s Harley Kimbro Lewis, with Martin Harley and Daniel Kimbro. Never a fan of more is more, his brief, for producer Joe MacMahon, was to make the album as sparse as could be made possible.

With laid back arrangements, acoustic and lightly amplified guitars, stand up bass and clackety drums, with occasional keys, this is music played for back porch outdoor ruminations. And, while the pervasive mood is melancholia, by no means is that exclusively the case. Peak sad, mind, then comes with a gorgeous duet, The Light, vocals shared with Judy Blank, which, up with opener, Chase The Moon, is one of the main highlight songs.

The album closes with a spare and solo Lewis singing a song he wished he had written, there Indigo Girls’ Three Country Highway. Like the rest of the album, everything’s fine, it’s alright.

You can have your cutting edges, but sometimes the bluntest of blades work best, this trio only to well aware of that, deliberately eschewing just about everything of this century. And a fair bit of last. This is a jug band jamboree of plucking, picking and hollering, all for the love of it. With 21 songs spread over just under an hour, if anything palls, it won’t for long, with another along pronto.

So who Cohen, Ellis and Ellis? The answer being three veterans of the blues and ragtime circuit, academics all, expert in the idiom at which they excel. If you like the acoustic play of Jorma Kaukonen, in or out of Hot Tuna, this is similar territory, with songs grasped both from history and from now, some new compositions that maintain the style seamlessly.

With this many songs to play with, and the sense is that they do play, the trio show off the many and varies nuances that three distinct voices and a bevy of instruments, can provide, never becoming amorphous nor monochrome. Old timey has seldom sounded so good timey.

An album that falls not too far from the day job in Eluvietie, Starveil finds Fabienne Erni offering up a reasonably familiar mix of modern metal intensity and folk-inspired textures. All the things that make Eluvietie such an exciting prospect are there – heavy riffs, grandiose arrangements, and organic instruments, all topped off with with Fabienne’s distinctive vocal presence.

Central to the album is a focus on storytelling. As maybe expected, a darkness and a passion envelops us into an atmospheric and emotionally driven world that gradually reveals its own developing lore. The haunting atmospheres of Ritual and Thalen Muron, often disturbed by cruching Metallic moments and catchy hooks that peak with a Forged in Me that wouldn’t be out of place in the hands of Frozen’s Elsa.

Subtle narrative details, symbolic elements, and pieces of an invented fantasy language form a common thread through the album, unveiling a graphic personal artistic vision delivered in a evocative journey embellished with a musical diversity.

As Fabienne sings in the title track, “close your eyes and hold the thread” and prepare to be enveloped by a set that shines and sparkles in short bursts of light.

Red Sun Atacama are a trio, based in Bordeaux, who have a developed a unique signature sound. Fusing stoner metal, psychedelia and punk, with surprising mid song musical changes, their music is quite impossible to resist.

Comprising, Clément Márquez (bass, vocals), Vincent Hospital (guitar), and Robin Caillon (drums), their third album Summerchild, is a masterpiece of down tuned, psychedelic, symphonies, that causes the listener to almost imperceptibly move up the volume dial.

Passenger, the opening track, illustrates the surprising twists in the band’s music. Driven punk energy and fuzz-soaked guitar, suddenly break down halfway into a beautiful and shimmering slow psychedelic blues section.

Weightless builds slowly around a gentle guitar figure, before slamming into a melee of stoner metal riffing that never lets up, until the band hit an almost country and western like groove. The title track quite wonderfully has the band sounding like a free form version of the iconic Sugar.  

A band who’ve been causing some waves on the Progressive scene with convivial nods to the Art Rock and Post Rock quarters and certainly worthy of investigation.

A bit of Nick Drake subtlety, a hint of Thom Yorke vocalising, a flash of razor sharp Wilson-isms and a swing between acoustic and electric soundzones. Many avenues are explored

After the fizzing dynamism of what initially could be the star turn The Wild Ones, Our Heads Spinning rears and bucks wildly while by complete contrast, Under The Trees is all pastoral gentility and fragile voices.

Never outstaying their welcome, and maybe aware that too much of a good thing leaves one wanting less, seven songs – or Pictures, or pictures – highlight an expansive skill set and pallette.

Lush melodrama is clearly the current stock in trade for this longstanding band, hidden in full sight, in Inkberrow, Worcs, these past 20 years. This is album number 17. Lavish strings and woodwinds wash the lugubrious vocal of Simon Huw Jones in a rich wash, sometimes evoking Nick Cave, sometimes someone a little further over to the dark side.

A clear sonic influence might be Tindersticks, but, if Staples and co. mine European noir soundtrack territory, this 5 piece show more a homegrown allegiance to moody British films, in black and white, from the 1950’s into 60s. Think John Barry, or, for the atmospheric opener, The Silver Key, Anton Karas’ Harry Lime theme.

The bass and drums, Grant Gordon and Paul Hill, provide always a solid yet inventive basis for imagination to soar, with Jones’ brother, Justin, with whom he first founded the group, adding textural guitar parts, informed by post-punk.

As the 11 tracks waft into stories, images form. Echoes of dream home heartaches drift in for The Trickster, and, with swirling keys, from Colin Ozone, who supplies also clarinet and other wind instruments, I Lit A Light could be Scott Walker searching out for his post Walker Brother’s direction. Sink into Catherine Graindorge’s string parts and wallow.

Glasgow’s Void of Light are a six-piece band who deliver ferocious and immersive post-metal soundscapes, rich in musical detail. At The Barrier reviewed very positively, their self-titled first release and 2023’s follow up EP Enshroud.

Asymmetries is a five-track album, that shows the band’s tight grip of dynamics, melody, and crushing waves of sound, led by a three-guitar front line. Their sweeping compositions offer beautifully integrated layers of sound.

The opening track, The Passing Hours, sets the template, with wistful melodies competing with sheets of reverberating guitars and pummelling drum and bass rhythms. Ali Lauder’s magnificent, growled vocals provide the thematic glue. 

The lengthy Still The Night Skies is the album’s towering achievement. Where vocally, there are resonances of the Walker Brothers, intriguingly meeting with a glorious sequence of ringing bass guitar lines, background drone sounds, and an avalanche of sometimes distorted and at other times pastoral guitars.