Battlefield Dance Floor

This 18th studio album from Devon favourites Show of Hands treads territory their loyal fans know so well – a pulsing mix of Phil Beer's driving fiddle numbers interspersed with Steve Knightley's trademark soulful ballads of love and loss. The line-up has now doubled in size, with regular double bassist Miranda Sykes now joined by Irish percussionist Cormac Byrne.

If there is a thread to this album, it's soldiering, from the title-track (a bawdy little bar-band dance tune about how all the great battles of history were preceded by a good knees-up) to Beer's take on Adrian Mannering's departing soldier ballad ‘My True Love’ and the military tattoo beat of ‘Swift & Bold’. But there is no single focus. It shifts from ‘Forfarshire’, a beautiful, sparse duet between Knightley and Sykes, to the tongue-in-cheek Cornish reggae singalong ‘Dreckley’ and ‘Mother Tongue’, which was co-written by Knightley and dhol drummer Johnny Kalsi featuring qawwali vocals from Shahid Khan. There's even time to revisit old favourite ‘No Secrets’ and a cover of Leonard Cohen's ‘First We Take Manhattan’. This is an album of so many parts that it can feel rather scattered, but the elements make for a very enjoyable Greatest Hits feel.