Holly Lerski
Album: The Wooden House
Label: The Laundry Label
Tracks: 10
Website: http://www.hollylerski.com

Former singer with acclaimed but under-achieving folk-rock outfit Angelou, Lerski's been following a solo career since 2003, this her fourth album. Not a great deal has changed over the years, her voice still clear and feathery, the comparisons still embracing The Sundays, Eddi Reader (especially on the guitar waltzing Come Sit Down) and Beth Orton, the music light and summery.

The album takes its title from the shed at the bottom of her garden which serves as her home recording studio and where, with just an old Macboook and one microphone, she recorded the album, laying down guitars, drums, ukulele and even coffee cups and spoons herself, enlisting Bonnie Raitt's bassist James Hutchinson and Megson's Stu Hanna to handle producer duties.

Lyrically, it's very much an album of love songs, couched in light and breezy folksy melodies with occasional dashes of bubbling Americana, kicking off with the two minute ukulele-strummed hide your broken heart Inkblot and proceeding swiftly into the wistful banjo-based title track with its catchy, sunny chorus. This, in turn, gives way to the acoustic upbeat Building You The Ark, pattering along on syncopated guitar and another nagging chorus with develops into call and response multi-tracked harmonies in the final stretch.

Half way through comes arguably the album's standout track, Oh Atoms, Oh Molecules, its shuffling rhythm, bluegrass fiddle and handclap percussion perfectly capturing the effervescent chemistry of new love. The musical mood changes for Magpie, its slow strum verses counterpointed by the swell of the dreamy chorus as she sings "you'd better change my life this time, magpie". If that has its arms open, Happy Sad is a more introspective and, with acoustic guitar and layered harmonies, more musically complex reflection on the end of a relationship and that "there's just no guarantee in life". Exploring the nature of relationships further, the softly sung Show and Tell (another excursion into multi-tracked harmonies) observes the need for give and take ("how I can't tell you if you don't show me") and how love can kick you in the gut. If there's a hint of playfulness there, she gives it full rein on Pudding Pie, where, to a backdrop of banjo, uke, guitar and, in the final stretch, those spoons and jars providing percussion, the song delivers and extended food metaphor about being open to try all sorts of dishes to enjoy life to the full.

The album ends on another reflective note with the breathily sung waltzing Homespun about wanting to belong to someplace and to be loved, to have "the house with the cats in the yard, vines up the walls" and "to be close to someone"; a place to call home. Beguilingly unassuming and beautifully crafted, delivered in a voice as fresh as newly laundered linen and as enticing as the scent of lilacs, Lerski's house is open to visitors. Make sure you drop by

Mike Davies