Lisbee Stainton
Album: Word Games
Label: Marionet Music
Tracks: 12
Website: http://www.lisbeestainton.com

Following a generally positive reception for 2011's Go, this sumptuously presented fourth album marks a confident leap forward as Lisbee Stainton broadens her horizons and widens the scope of her music, from the delicate melancholia with which she made her first forays to widescreen neo-Bush anthems like the opening cut, Red Dog Running, which adds a dramatic edge to her music that would have been unthinkable a couple of years ago.

The ballsy Make Me Stay is barely recognisable from fragile beauty of her 2010 sophomore outing, Girl On An Unmade Bed. As charming as that breakthrough record undoubtedly was, there is something else afoot on this album that marks a new talent in full bloom.

Somebody who knows a bit such things once told us coyness is nice, but coyness can stop you from saying all the things in life you'd like to. And so it seems for Lisbee Stainton as the entrancing Dance With Me tinkers with tempo and timbre, defying and toying with expectation; before she produces a stunning vocal performance on Fool's Gold that is never overshadowed by a powerful, kitchen-sink-and-all musical backing.

Pulse and Madron's Well are more slender (but no less engaging) turns, the latter a co-write with Seth Lakeman, in whose band Lisbee has long been a fixture. Lakeman plays on most of the album and also lends his pen to the deliciously forlorn The Journey, perhaps the closest Lisbee comes to a straightforward folk song here.

Purists may hesitate to admit as much, but Word Games is so assured, so poised that it's nigh on impossible to make a case against such rich pluralism.

Nick Churchill
www.thegranvillechambers.co.uk