Liz Green
Album: O,Devotion!
Label: Play It Again Sam
Tracks: 10
Website: www.lizgreenmusic.co.uk

Hearing Liz Green's charming debut you expect to look outside the window and see Harold Lloyd, a Model T Ford, or a New Orleans marching band - all in black and white of course. Although she takes her musical cues from Depression-era American folk songs, Liz filters them through a recognisably English experience - less self-consciously Gothic, more romantic, melancholic even. And definitely northern.

Her songs are populated by troubled characters whose pain is accentuated by her woe-begotten delivery, where even moments of bright light and joy are tempered by coal black humour and warning. The closing Gallows is a stunning conglomeration of her strong suits - a distinctive voice, elegantly simply guitar playing and engaging story telling. Elsewhere, the strolling Displacement Song benefits from the restrained application of a brass section, which also puts a spring in the step of Midnight Blues. Bad Medicine was released as a single four years ago, after Liz won the Glastonbury Emerging Talent contest and although it appears here in a slightly different form, it still has the power to unsettle.

Recorded in the analogue hiss and buzz of Hackney's Toerag Studios (where the White Stripes made Elephant), Liam Watson's hands-off production allows the songs to sit and plays with their own bare bones. It's a devilishly dark record laced with moments of beauty, acres of sorrow and just enough hope that it'll all be OK in the end.

Nick Churchill
www.thegranvillechambers.co.uk