Album: Bella Hardy, Battleplan (NOE)

Hardy writes careful personalisations of English folk lyrics, shading them into a more contemporary poetic singer-songwriterly style: the romance of the folk world romanticised.

She's a thoughtful arranger, too, with a decent ear for melody. Here, she arranges herself neatly within an unashamedly percussive acoustic quintet. What may inhibit Hardy from getting her dues, however, is her voice, which dwells thinly on the yelping side of the hedge.