Album: Krystle Warren and the Facultya, Time To Keep: Love Songs EP (Parlour Door Music)

There are elements of Nina Simone and Joan Armatrading in folk-jazz singer Krystle Warren's voice, and even Dusty at her dustiest, on the five tracks which here serve as a taster for two albums' worth of material intended for release over the next year.

Airy and nonchalant over the languid tango of "Forever Is A Long Time", she wields emotion through the subtlest shifts of pitch and emphasis, allowing herself just one superb, restrained touch of melisma at the end. Her vocal line is more questing over the hand percussion, guitar arpeggios and subdued, burnt-cream swells of horns that make up "Sunbeams", while her setting of William Blake's "The Clod And The Pebble" profits greatly from the layered harmonies offsetting her deep lead vocal.

DOWNLOAD THIS: Forever Is A Long Time; Sunbeams; The Clod And The Pebble