The Hawthornes
Album: Stoneville Street
Label: Severed Head
Tracks: 12
Website: http://thehawthornes.bandcamp.com

Based in Cheltenham (from whence the band name and album title come) and comprising Suffolk-born singer/guitarist/writer Louisa Gaylard (who's previously released a solo EP and two albums), Jesse Benns on cajon and mandolin (live, he also plays soundbox percussion) and Gordy Patridge on bass and backing vocals, the trio made their recording debut last year with an eponymous EP featuring four tracks of 'beat driven acoustic and folk music'.

New versions of these appear here, alongside eight other Gaylard-penned numbers, most of which revolve around themes of relationships and hopes of a better tomorrow, energetically strummed and conversationally sung in a strongly accented voice that can't help but trot out the Kate Nash/Lily Allen comparisons, though there's also a touch of Kate Rusby in there too.

The album opens in exuberant style with 'Changing Ways' that bears testament to her Frank Turner influences and continues in similar mode with 'Edgar' (which references Edgar Allen Poe), featuring a catchy 'when will I see you' ascending scales chorus and a lyric that hints at emotional shut down ("when I look at your face I see some stranger that's got between the man I love"). Though titled 'Frank', the slower tempo third track, is more about being candid than someone's name, the lyric sketching the impact of moving away from home on the mother-daughter relationship.

Co-penned with Benns, the hiccuppy rhythm jazzy-blues 'Saturday' is the first of the revamped EP tracks, the others being the folk shanty waltzing 'Shacklehead' with its incipient nervous breakdown lyric and flamenco flourish trumpet courtesy of Gregory Wilson-Copp; the jaunty busker pop drunken regrets of 'Rainy Day'; and, minus the original's Young Frankenstein sample but again with added trumpet, the country'n'skiffle bounce of living in a rut 'Where Are We All Going?'

As with the live set, the scurrying rhythm 'Drama Queen' (a touch of spaghetti western to the guitar, perhaps) is a highlight here with its portrait of petulance, while, among the other new tracks, two ring particular changes. Both Benn co-writes, the folksy, self-confined-themed 'Too Small For Me' (another song dealing with mental instability?) has an almost hymnal tumbling melody, while the 88 seconds 'Circus Light' is a trad-styled unaccompanied number spotlighting Gaylard's vocal dexterity.

On 'Free Me', she says "the people around me are telling me to sing my heart out." Good advice if you ask me.

Mike Davies