Night Visiting: reviews

There has been much anticipation about Derbyshire's Bella Hardy since she caused a stir with her vibrant fiddle-singing performance at the BBC Young Folk Awards a couple of years ago (when Lauren MacColl was the winner) but she wisely avoided the temptation to rush into this debut album.

She's served time with the bands The Pack and Ola and, now 23, has acquired the experience and maturity to deliver ballads as demanding as Bonny Susie Cleland, Young Edmund and All Things Are Quite Silent and make you believe them, while her remarkable unaccompanied performance of Molly Vaughan is full of colour and nuance, highlighting the ambiguities of the story and the burning question – accident or murder? These are the details that make traditional ballads so enduring and if she carries on like this, comparisons with June Tabor won’t be far away.

Astutely, she's also given us an album of light and shade. Corrina Hewat's dancing harp lightens Bonny Susie Cleland and Bella's own compelling night visiting song Three Black Feathers which opens the album with such eerie grace. Chris Sherburn of Last Night's Fun, the Askew sisters, Joey Oliver of 4-4-2 and Hannah James of Kerfuffle also contribute significantly to a series of bright arrangements that maintain allure during even the darker material.

She also throws in a couple of interesting curve balls. Heart Hill is a brilliant, unusual, testing song by San Franciscan Kristina Olsen dripping in romance and tragedy which might sound kitsch in the wrong hands; but Bella treats it as a modern folk allegory and turns it into an epic. And there’s her own impossibly catchy message to Jane Eyre – Alone, Jane? – a jaunty, left-field aside that again shows Bella Hardy is more than a new generation folk revivalist.

She's already a fine singer and she'll get better, but she clearly thinks deeply about her music and the best way to present it. Her potential is massive. Meanwhile this is an exciting, accomplished debut. Colin Irwin

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