Shadows

It's been a productive few years for the acclaimed and distinctive English art-folk duo of Belinda O’Hooley and Heidi Tidow. The excellent album The Hum (2014) was rapidly followed by a smaller but expertly prepared Summat's Brewin (2015), foaming over with the UK's happy national obsession with booze as medication (or perhaps accentuation) of our daily pains.

Now, barely pausing for breath, comes this dense, complex, beautifully performed new set, which draws some of its cohesive powers from Carl Jung's concepts of ‘The Shadow’: as manifest in the right-wing shadows cast upon the body politic in ‘Made in England’ (a song that sounds even weightier, post-Brexit); or in the story of origins personal and cultural that is the album's opener, ‘Colne Valley Hearts’. The title-track is a beautiful instrumental piece from O’Hooley and her Steinway grand, recorded in one take, and as well as the duo's striking harmony and lead vocals there's powerful instrumental support from a long list of friends and fellow stars of the contemporary folk scene – Hannah James, Hazel Askew, Rowan Rheingans and Pete Flood among them. The tender bruise of childhood emotions recollected in adulthood that is ‘The Needle and the Hand’, led by Tidow, is one of the standouts, alongside the closing version of Joni Mitchell's Christmas song, ‘River’.