Album: Joan Coffey, Struggles and Lulls, (Tipod)

The world is not short of length-and-line singer-songwriters doing it for themselves, hoping to fly under the major-label radar. Most of them are very ordinary.

This one's good. She's Irish, she's warmly direct in her address to the struggles and lulls of love, and her language is neither fey nor self-dramatising. Thea Gilmore appears, which figures – they share a grave musical conservatism which, unusually, sounds as if it is founded in a determination to get the content over with a minimum of fuss. Worth investigating.