Love and Leave You

As the title suggests 100 Mile House's second album is all about relationships and loss. Love and Leave You is unflinching in its acknowledgment of life's inevitable sadnesses. The 11 songs cover themes including depression, parental alcoholism, difficulties starting a family, the breakdown of sibling relationships, the loss of a child and caring for a partner with dementia.

If all of this sounds rather too melancholic, the album is also a celebration of human warmth and resilience. As the lyrics of ‘Grateful’ observe: ‘If it wasn't for our darkness we wouldn't know what we're made of The moral of ‘Like Each Day’ – a beautifully-crafted family saga – is that, whatever life throws at us, we should live each day as if it's our last.

This oddly-named Anglo-Canadian duo are husband and wife Peter Stone and Denise MacKay. Stone's vocal delivery, always understated, is reminiscent of John Gorka and Leonard Cohen. With sympathetic, delicate touches of mandolin and violin, the songs’ narratives are all the more emotionally powerful for their matter-of-fact restraint and uncluttered arrangements.