For the past few years my Album of the Year has leapt out at me, craved attention, stood out from the competition. With no disrespect to Nick Mulvey’s fine second album, that wasn’t the case in 2017. Many albums this year had vital, enjoyable music, but marred by much lesser songs.

Nick Mulvey (b.1984) is a singer-songwriter who draws from a refreshing and unexpected palette of global roots music, modernist classical and electronica.

Disc of the Day reviews new albums, week in, week out, all year. Below are the albums to which our writers awarded five stars. Click on any one of them to find out why.

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British singer-songwriter Nick Mulvey’s new album, Wake Up Now, is one of the year’s finest. However, there’s a moment on the single “Myela”, a heartfelt Afro-Latin stomper protesting the plight of refugees, which can grate. The song suddenly stops and female backing singers begin a nursery rhyme chant of “I am your neighbour, you are my neighbour”. On record it seems trite; however, in concert at this eye-pleasing, airy Bexhill-on-Sea venue, it’s transformative. Mulvey and his five-piece band use the sequence as a launch pad for a cosmic jam, before settling into a brief snippet of Gary Clail & On-U Sound System’s “Rumours” (“of war”).

The song is one of this concert’s highlights and Mulvey introduces it by deadpanning, understatedly, that “truth is not rampant” in the world in 2017. His music, by contrast, is fervent in its truth-seeking. It seems to be aiming towards a higher purpose and, at its best, achieves elevation. He may look quite ordinary in his jeans, black shirt, beanie hat and dark beard, but his skill with a guitar is revelatory, and his quiet demeanour is belied by moments when the music takes off to somewhere else. In a funny sort of way – and not musically – there’s something of the Grateful Dead about it all, but Mulvey and co. have not yet reached the place where four-hour jams are de rigeur.

The set runs through most of the new album, dips into his first album, and even includes an unreleased song called “The Doing Is Done” which effectively combines drone harmonics with an African chant aesthetic. His sound is very WOMAD, a stew of global styles, built around his voracious appetite for learning new guitar techniques from across the world. His band is there every step of the way, notably his wife Isadora on ukulele and backing vocals, his multi-instrumentalist sidesman Frederico Bruno, and, most visual of all (including the frontman!), the striking, blond-maned valkyrie Fifi Dewey on synth and scorching electric guitar solos.

The band leaves the stage to allow for a rather tentative campfire-style audience sing-along to Mulvey’s most recognisable song, “Cucurucu”, which he has to restart due to a cough, but is there to add texture to quiet beautiful songs such as “We Are Never Apart” and the new album’s stunning meditation on death, “When the Body Is Gone”. They don’t play one of Mulvey’s most popuar older songs, "Nitrous”, but they get away with it because there’s enough potency to keep everyone happy in new songs such as “Unconditional” and the encore-opening, enthneogenic ballad “Infinite Trees” ("Seems to me a galaxy is calling us/Calling us on and on/Calling us into its infinity”).

If I had a quibble, it would be that there’s sometimes a solemnity which adds occasional unfunky weight when this band make music that's elastic, wide-eyed and lighter than air. This could just be because it’s the last night of the tour and, in any case, it’s nit-picking. It’s a great gig, and it climaxes with the second best song of this year, “Mountain to Move”, so we’re sent off onto the wildly windswept seafront singing its ecstatic chorus, “Wake up now!”, an anthem for our times.

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Overleaf: watch the video for Nick Mulvey "Mountain to Move"

Recorded in Rhinebeck, upstate New York, the ninth album in Josh Ritter’s 18-year career strikes many moods, from the manic to the contemplative. It is, he has said, a record of storms, internal and external; of the darkness before a summer storm, “the smell of gathering electricity in the atmosphere” – literally and metaphorically. The cover artwork – he is an accomplished painter – is suitably evocative.

Nick Mulvey’s 2014 debut album First Mind may be one of the century’s best so far. Album number two, then, has the critical bar set high. On that opening record, the ex-Portico Quartet singer-songwriter majored in complex-yet-simple songs that wove intricate Latin/classical-flecked guitar work with electronic tones and a sense of wide-eyed openness. Wake Up Now initially seems to be travelling a similar path, but soon proves to be marinated in African feeling and have its scope set more cosmically. It is a lovely album and a match for its predecessor.

In a cynical age, where irony is king, Nick Mulvey is a man out of time. Perhaps he’s the harbinger of a more beautiful era around the corner. In 2017, after all, even the word “beauty” is regarded with wariness. Imbued with the spiritual philosophies of Ram Dass, a surviving key player from the last age of peace’n’love, Mulvey’s music has an unfettered grace. He applies this to the plight of refugees on “Myela” and “We Are Never Apart”. The latter is a twinkling, gorgeous strum that seems to be floating in orbit, while the former may be held up as evidence for those who find Mulvey’s work cloying. Its Afro-pop “I am your neighbour/You are my neighbour” chorus will certainly be too nursery rhyme trite for many.

Much of the album, however, is inarguable. The intriguing lyrics of songs such as “Transform Your Game”, which boasts chunkier percussion than Mulvey usually goes for, are matched by a subtle musicality that’s both featherlight and delicious. The gentle, jazzy, almost ecclesiastical “When the Body Is Gone” is a song that sticks up two fingers to existential angst, even death itself, while the epic sing-along “Mountain to Move” achieves anthem status. There are moments when Mulvey faintly recalls Peter Gabriel at his most ecstatic but, other than that, there are no comparisons. He’s a man alone, pushing at the forefront with unembarrassed joy and longing. I want to go with him.

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Overleaf: Watch the video for "Myela" by Nick Mulvey