Bella Hardy
Album: Battleplan
Label: Noe
Tracks: 11
Website: http://www.bellahardy.com

After (jointly) winning the BBC Radio 2 Folk Award for Best Original Song last year, Bella now continues her brave exploration of the world of song with her fourth album proper (that's not counting her recent side-projects The Dark Peak And The White, the seasonal album Bright Morning Star and the collaboration Laylam with Eliza Carthy et al.). This new collection intersperses telling and ingenious treatments of traditional material (more Songs Lost And Stolen, you might say) with some stylistically-diverse songs of her own composition. These all take their cue in some measure from the concept of Battleplan, an ideal state of affairs which is almost never achieved.

Bella's interpretive creativity achieves a new level with the challenge this presents; she not only plausibly re-imagines traditional ballads from a female perspective, but also brings her own personal experiences into the mix; this is notwithstanding the fact that some of the traditional songs have already been subjected to countless reinterpretations down the ages. Bella's latest reworking of Yellow Handkerchief/Flash Company brings a newly rueful expressivity (much aided by Angus Lyon's piano accompaniment), while the eerie tattoo of Good Man's Wife (which rather intriguingly is seen to stem from The Raggle Taggle Gypsies) benefits from a sparse pizzicato fiddle and a desperate vocal backing chant that reflects the female protagonist's recognition that war never goes to plan.

The devilish momentum of Whisky You're The Devil forces piano and drums together in almost unholy counterpoint to Bella's rewritten tune, and a pounding drone-heavy beat permeates the fiddle-sing of Through Lonesome Woods. The Seventh Girl is a feisty, skipping retelling of the Outlandish Knight ballad that reflects the status of its heroine, and a charming, rustic-piano-backed version of the shanty One More Day provides a pleasing and apt disc finale - although the distinctly late-night-lounge feel of Bella's own "coffee shop crooning song" Maybe You Might could equally well have fitted that particular bill.

On this disc, Bella's renowned compelling and well-controlled vocal delivery is reliably supported by her current touring band The Midnight Watch (comprising Anna Massie, Angus Lyon, James Lindsay and Mattie Foulds), who provide a sensitive (indeed, sometimes chillingly so) backdrop that also displays a keen contemporary edge.

Perhaps one or two of the new songs have the conscious air of therapy (Three Pieces Of My Heart), but for the most part they convince; for instance, Sleeping Beauty seems to tread the right side of the line in its depiction of the unrealistic expectations of relationships, while Drifting Away is a beautifully conceived snapshot of a touring artist's perception of our world. Even so, for all the persuasiveness of the storytelling, the thematic unity of the material and the imagination of the arrangements, I'm left with a mild feeling of the album not quite hanging together, which may in part be attributed to its brevity.

David Kidman