This second album from Gavin Fairhall Lever is an explosion in a paint shop – traditional Celtic and contemporary folk music, seasoned with jazz improv, tumble together joyfully with instances of shimmering stillness. The opener, ‘Taurus’ is a potent brew of power bass and strutting fiddle with a fleeting interlude of introspection.

‘Tearing Down Walls’ is beautifully recorded and has a pleasingly analogue sound. The trio have a razor-edged instinct for arrangement, and vocal two-part harmonies rest with ease against the  instrumental layering, like whispering conspirators. Nowhere is this shown better than in the truly moving ‘Mama’s Here’. There are silent, unshed tears and suppressed anger in this ‘kitchen-table lullaby’ of childhood wartime disruption.  Gavin James is a composer and multi-instrumentalist whose music weaves between the sacred traditional and the irreverent secular, and the shared vocal between James and Adrian Lever on this track is a joy – two voices made for each other.

I couldn’t take my ears off this one. A tightly knitted tapestry – a sensuous listen pricked by sharp thorns and soothed by fine flowers.

Bob Langstaff.