Casting a contemporary slant on ancient British folk songs is not a task for the faint-hearted - but 26-year-old Eliza Carthy is a more imposing musician than the average finger-in-the-ear folkette. Carthy has soaked up everything her parents (Norma Waterson and Martin Carthy) could throw at her, then scrubbed the music down to its essence. The songs she chooses - "an expression of Englishness as I feel it", she says - are riddled with love, death and yarns about sailing ships and press gangs. Carthy sings them with pressing immediacy, her voice buoyed up by surging acoustic arrangements that can leap from the sprightly jig of The Little Gypsy Girl to the New Orleans-esque marching band in Willow Tree. One of many highlights is her own wobbly, clanging piano on In London So Fair. And you thought you didn't like folk music?
