Of Labour and Love

Alex Cumming, Kate Locksley, Rosie Calvert and Will Finn first began singing together after meeting on the famed Newcastle University Folk and Traditional Music degree course; their 2013 debut One for the Pot was recorded while they were all still studying. A year on from graduation, the second album from this youthful a capella four-piece finds them in engaging and confident form. Like its predecessor, the album largely consists of feisty and fresh re-workings of standards and traditional songs, ranging from a chilling tale of love and jealousy, ‘Oxford City’, to a rousing version of a Mississippi steamboat work song, ‘Sugar in the Hold’, recently also revived by Fisherman's Friends. There's also a striking new song from Kate Locksley, ‘The Antiguan Graveyard’, describing the perilous lives of English seamen dispatched to that Caribbean outpost in the 18th century. It's all delivered in a distinctive, varied style. It closes with a poignant song of farewell, ‘Journey's End’; this impressive album marks, the group say, the closing of an important chapter of their lives and the beginning of a new one.