Album: Tracy Bonham, Masts of Manhatta (Lojinx)

Her first album in five years finds Tracy Bonham mostly reflecting on female rites of passage in songs like "In the Moonlight" and "Josephine" – the former featuring two girls out for the evening, the latter expressing the emptiness left behind when one runs off with a carnival worker.

The most assured is "Your Night Is Wide Open", in which cello and fingerstyle guitar backdrop idealised recollections, before brusque drums usher in a harder kernel of truth. But the standout track is surely "Devil's Got Your Boyfriend", an account of two-timing in which the sinuous, swaying Tom Waits-ian groove is laced with Bonham's elegant violin line and veneered with the 1940s charm of her harmonies, a brilliant blend of contrasting emotional pulls.

DOWNLOAD THIS Devil's Got Your Boyfriend; Your Night Is Wide Open; Josephine