Album: Johnny Parry Chamber Orchestra, Fields & Birds & Things (Lost Toys)

With Fields & Birds & Things, Johnny Parry vaults his way from being just another singer-songwriter to something more akin to the UK's equivalent of Sufjan Stevens, an artist with a distinctive musical vision, realised by a sprawling orchestra whose lowing horns and mournful cellos impart a convincing sense of precarious mortality to songs peopled by the damned, the dispossessed and the already dead.

There's the doomed couple on the lam whose furtive progress is sketched in "Men Will Hang Again"; the writer haunted by his own creation in "Lucy Isabella & I"; and the deceased soul sped on its way in "Find Your Way Home" – yet the only salve against cruel fate appears to be the litany of self-help clichés that comprises "Rebuild It Piece By Piece".

DOWNLOAD THIS Men Will Hang Again; Find Your Way Home; Love & Death