Poor Strange Girl

A singer, multi-instrumentalist and dancer from Ripponden in West Yorkshire, Alice Jones has been around folk music since she was a babe in arms in the 1970s, and has been performing, initially as an Appalachian clog dancer, since the tender age of 12. This may well be why her solo debut sounds quite so confident and sincere, albeit with a distinctly mischievous streak running through it. Accompanied here and there by fiddler Tom Kitching and double-bassist Hugh Bradley, with Jones herself playing harmonium, whistle or tenor guitar, it's her precise yet characterful voice that tends to dominate wherever and however she chooses to use it, whether it's insidious and unsettling on the traditional ballad of infanticide ‘The Cruel Mother’, or aching and lovelorn on ‘Her Bright Smile Haunts Me Still’.

Her song choices show a commendable leaning towards those rare instances of girl power in the traditional canon, including the female philanderer celebrated in ‘Green Bushes’ or the righteously vengeful woman in ‘The Castle by the Sea’. It's all rather lovely and seductive, yet menacing and strange: a combination that makes for classic folk music and an unusually powerful debut.