Bridie Jackson & The Arbour
Album: Far From The Tree
Label: Like A Pergola
Tracks: 2
Website: http://www.bridieandthearbour.com

Recent recipients of a Women Make Music grant from the PRS for Music Foundation, the Newcastle-upon-Tyne quartet are using the funds to support the creation and recording of new material, the first fruit of which come with these two numbers, available as digital downloads.

If you've not encountered them before, they line up as Jackson, cellist/double bassist Jenny Nedick, violinist Rachel Cross and percussionist Carol Bowden, the latter two also providing harmonies, and are particularly distinctive in their use of bell plates, a sort of handchime. Their debut album was an ethereal, wintry, atmospheric affair, often drawing in Balkan influences as well as English traditional folk, and, while, they've become more accessible, they've maintained that dark alt-folk feel, rich in a sense of space and tension. That's certainly true of Far From The Tree, pulsing, nervy strings and clicking percussion driving the rhythm and backdropping Jackson's swooping and soaring powerful vocal before, just under the two minute mark, it switches tack for a warm, almost hymnal coda of violin and interwoven harmonies.

The B side (if you can such a thing on a download), Final Lullaby, is a marked contrast, a beautiful spare, voice and string arrangement of a song originally composed for massed choir (and you can imagine what a spine-shivering sound that would have been) as a Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration and carrying with it a sense of both sadness and hope as it fades on the line "and you're still here." On this early evidence, their third album should be something very special indeed.

Mike Davies