Lady Maisery (above) create some of the most exquisite, thrilling vocal harmony work in the English folk scene. Hannah James, Rowan Rheingans and Hazel Askew are all involved in other projects, but here they work together with an impressive blend of ease and sophistication on an album that matches delicate a cappella singing against passages of multi-instrumental work, with Askew’s harp and concertina joining Rheingans’s fiddle, banjo and piano, plus James’s accordion and celebrated “foot percussion”. There are cheerfully rapid-fire demonstrations of “diddling” (tune-singing with no lyrics), but the set is dominated by songs about “life’s journey”, with new compositions mixed with traditional material given a contemporary, political edge. There are spine-tingling harmonies on the reworking of Todd Rundgren’s Honest Work (about unemployment and industrial collapse), while Land on the Shore is an American hymn of parting given new relevance by the refugee crisis.
