Emily Portman
Album: Hatchling
Label: Furrow
Tracks: 13
Website: http://www.emilyportman.co.uk

Following her seriously stunning debut CD The Glamoury was always going to be really hard, and last year's stop-gap EP Hinge Of The Year formed a taster that promised much for its followup Hatchling, which has now finally been unleashed on the world. It's everything you might expect, a further excursion into Emily's special world in which fairytale and mythology are informed by, and collide with, tradition at a very oblique angle indeed while keeping even their most distant reference points just about visible out of the corner of the eye.

At first hearing, I didn't find Hatchling quite as darkly satisfying overall as The Glamoury; perhaps this was a reflection more of my own macabre taste, I wondered, for all that it's clear that it inhabits broadly the same weirdlore universe as its predecessor. So maybe its quirks and idiosyncrasies are slightly less pronounced, or maybe it's just that they're less of a shock to the system than that first close encounter with The Glamoury had provided. But I'd stress that this initial hearing was to prove as deceptive as the gently inviting settings and the compelling, ringing beauty of Emily's delivery which belies the weird darkling child lurking beneath the surface; these aspects charm the ear and mind like crazy.

Emily's chosen soundscape for this new collection principally involves her Trio collaborators Rachel Newton (voice, harp, fiddle) and Lucy Farrell (voice, viola, saw), while Will Scrimshaw brings in some additional percussion and programming and Lucy Deakin bows some gorgeous cello lines. Two of the album's tracks have been revisited from the aforementioned EP, and familiarity has neither diminished their own appeal nor rendered their companions any less appealing. Even so, Hinge Of The Year and Scorching Sun can certainly be considered disc highlights; the former a woozy Lal Waterson-like slice of carnivalesque folk-noir, the latter (drawing on lyrics from an Italian lullaby) an enchanting duet with special guest Alasdair Roberts.

In all, the disc places eight of Emily's inspirational and intelligently realised originals (and a couple of her supremely creative arrangements of traditional songs) firmly in the frame of reinterpreted myth and legend: the seafaring tale of Jack was inspired by a 1760 broadside, Sleeping Beauty is an eerily mesmerising twist on the fairytale's premise, and Sunken Bells mingles images and events from half-remembered tales from Cornish and Norse mythologies. Ash Girl, a song of a lost child helped by her dead mother, is a reflective take on an Angela Carter source, while Old Mother Eve intriguingly (and subversively) retells the Adam and Eve story in the form of a Somerset wassail.

In between her original compositions Emily enterprisingly scatters three significantly shorter items: a pair of brief extracts of lullabies, and a magical rendition by Emily and Lucy of part of the early-17th-century Orlando Gibbons madrigal The Silver Swan. Those three tracks, done a cappella, have been recorded live in a kind of faux-retro lo-fi, a gimmick which doesn't entirely convince even though it gives the fragments an identity and unity within their own context. In fact, the disc is framed by lullabies: Hatchlings itself finds Leda, queen of Sparta, singing to her two sets of hatched twins to the accompaniment of a rustic Appalachian banjo, whereas the finale When You're Weary (aptly described as a tender lullaby for world-weary grow-ups) is (like the aforementioned fragments) done a cappella, but its superior recording quality gives it an altogether more plaintive immediacy and is a brilliant (if arguably an almost too deceptively soothing) way to close this utterly bewitching album.

David Kidman