Bonny Light Horseman

Seven years ago, Anaïs Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer released Child Ballads, winning a BBC Radio 2 Folk Award the following year, and bringing a freshness and sweetness to ballads both ancient and far from sweet. Since then, Mitchell has mounted and toured the Tony Award-winning Hadestown musical and now comes Bonny Light Horseman, comprising Mitchell, Fruit Bats' Eric D Johnson and guitarist Josh Kaufman. It's a set of British ballads transmogrified into the American tradition, with the likes of ‘The Roving’ beautifully sung by Mitchell and set to what sounds like the kissing cousin of the melody for ‘Knockin’ on Heaven's Door'.

Like tabloid headlines, passions don't change much. Love, sex, conflict, death are the sturdy four horsemen of many a great ballad, but unlike Child Ballads, the focus and the spirit of interpretation is looser, more expansive, swapping melodies, changing lyrics, adding choruses, bringing a fuzzy pop sensibility to the originals. Much of Bonny Light Horseman was recorded in a former GDR radio station in East Berlin, the Funkhaus, adding an enveloping reverb to the harmonies. It doesn't surpass the 2013 album, but is strikingly different enough in its intentions and execution to do without too close a comparison.