Love Songs

Opening with piano and a flourish of fiddle on instrumental track, ‘Summer Daylight Winter Darkness’, Bella Hardy’s tenth album is a welcome return to the traditional ballads she started out playing and singing on her classic 2007 debut Night Visiting and which she inhabits and continues to bring to life so well.

She is such a good singer of these songs. There’s a clarity and a smokiness in the voice she uses for ‘Hares on the Mountain’, accompanied by the guitar of Mike Vass, the album’s producer, while ‘Sprig of Thyme’ is brought to life against two nimble guitar lines and Hardy’s fully present vocal, singing of the inexorable workings of time, while one of the four self-penned songs here, ‘The Navigator’s Bride’, is an art song about the navigators who came to Edale to build the Cowburn railway tunnel in the late 19th century, with Tom Gibbs joining her on clarinet. ‘Greenwood Laddie’ is a song she’d sing as a teenager, and its guitar-fiddle arrangement proves an effective contrast to her mature voice, as does the minimalism of the music behind ‘Awake Awake’. The unaccompanied ‘Lowlands Away’, meanwhile, is one of the highlights of this warm, involving and beautiful set of songs.