Emily Portman is one of the most unsettling, spooky singers in the British folk scene. She has a light, breathy voice, writes gentle melodies that at times echo traditional songs, and then adds lyrics like these, at the start of Nightjar: “Small things I remember, how your hair came away in my daughter’s dimpled hand.” Earlier this year, as a member of the Furrow Collective, she contributed to a quietly powerful album of traditional songs about hanging, murder or bewitchment. Now comes her first solo set of exclusively self-written songs, many of them equally bleak or surreal, and often involving birds and stories of birth and bereavement. She’s a multi-instrumentalist, playing anything from banjo to piano, and the elegant backing is helped by contributions from Sam Sweeney, and by Furrow members Lucy Farrell and Rachel Newton, who add fiddle, harp, and subtle but appropriately edgy harmony vocals.
