The suggestion of creepy autoharp, a picked acoustic, a ghostly vocal: welcome to ‘50 White Lines’, the opening track on the eighth album from Kathryn Williams, the Liverpool-born songwriter who was Mercury nominated for Little Black Numbers back in 2000.
Williams writes deceptively simple songs hinged on canny little hooks, all layered in ethereal, even esoteric sounds – a real Joe Boyd meets Joe Meek production, except here the honours are done by Williams herself, in cahoots with Dream Academy graduate and folk star producer Kate St John.
Songs like ‘Winter Is Sharp’ – which sounds like it could have been written any time between now and 1400 – are pure but not purist. If Gillian Welch had been raised on anti-folk, nu-folk and Northern English folk, well, you get the idea.
Williams possesses the green and velvety tones of a June Tabor or a Nick Drake and writes melodies to suit: gentle but insistent, punctuated by age-old mandolin rhythms, droning harmonium and will o’ the wisp bells. Songs like ‘Smoke’ are as warm and close as eiderdown, ‘There Are Keys’ and ‘Cream of the Crop’ drift atop feather-light vibraphone and brushes, and, in a kinder universe, ‘Wanting And Waiting’ would be a surprise radio hit. “Up north where I live,” she sings on the album’s closer, “the sky is bigger.” Sounds like it. The Quickening is a tiding of comfort and joy.