Where is it from, the eldritch warble emanating from the throat of this sunken-cheeked mountain woman? What are her references? Was she bricked up in a turret for her formative years with nowt but a biscuit tin and a rattle, stunned by the sight of the moon and mesmerised by the rustlings in the undergrowth below?

I played my mate Jon a track from this album last year. Jon likes Marillion. He emitted a tortured screlch and jammed his fingers in his ears and rocked back and forth until the song ended. Then I played him another one.

"As an adolescent she worked as a funeral and wedding singer," a well-known know-all site informs us of Ms Foster. We are not told if she had different repertoires for these different occasions. I like to think not. Her unfettered deep-lung ullulations must have proved a blissfully 'other' soundtrack amid the smoked salmon and sugared almonds.

She's been ploughing a deep, fascinating furrow since one of her tracks popped up on some Devendra Barnyard compilation or other a few years ago. But on "This Coming Gladness" she's really voyaged above and beyond the freaky-folky-rinky-dink constraints of her various patchouli-swathed ninny contemporaries, going spectacularly 'furthur', yes, where no-one has gone before. Houston, we have a goblin - she's six foot tall and is wibbling lullabies about Jesus being a cypher.

The small band of fellow musicians playing behind her seem as excitingly unhurried and gloriously meandersome as she is, and as unconstrained by anything approaching traditional song structure. Lyrics break down. There are long, wordless vowel sounds rising through soft, tapered guitar lines like tendrils of smoke wending their way up through a trellis. Lines melt like ice cream and float around in gravity-free globules. The drums are there not to keep the beat, but to keep the beat away. This is music as immersion. In some kind of fungal alpine custard.

Reviews Index