Blow the Wind Southerly

The classically-trained UK-based singer, guitarist, composer and producer Esbe is nothing if not prolific – Blow the Wind Southerly is her seventh album in five years. She's eclectic, too, for previous releases have featured songs from Byzantium and settings of words by the Sufi mystic Rumi. Here she's laid down her guitar for an a cappella set of multi-layered vocal arrangements of well-known folk songs and nursery rhymes.

A reviewer should perhaps never sit on the fence, but I have to confess to mixed feelings here. There is no doubting the purity and beauty of Esbe's voice and her layered harmonies are often striking and full of melodic surprises. Her arrangements of ‘Summer Is Icumen In’ and ‘Scarborough Fair’, both sung as rounds, are smart and the use of found sounds – bird song, humming bees, the clip-clop of a horse on its way to the fair – is charming enough. Her re-imagining of ‘Greensleeves’ is also terrifically clever. Yet there's an irritating tendency to cutesy tweeness in her settings of ‘Oranges and Lemons’ and ‘My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean’ while her take on ‘Kumbaya’ is so precious it makes Joan Baez's version sound like Amy Winehouse.