Maeve O'Boyle - All My Sins - NetRhythms.co.uk

Releases by the Glasgow based specialist label may not come thick and fast, but you can always guarantee what when pops up it will bear a hallmark of quality. The track record's not bruised by the Glaswegian singer-songwriter debut, produced by Blue Nile knob-twiddler and featuring Ricky Ross and Francis McDonald co-writes and fiddle courtesy of John McCusker. It's the Ross co-penned folksy far from home reflections of Old Greenwich Time that provides the opening track, immediately revealing O'Boyle's beautifully measured, soaring emotion flecked voice and explaining just why she blew them away at 2006's Celtic Connections. A clutch of three melancholic mid-tempo self-penned songs, The Place You Became, Facing Home (written when she was 13) and Taxi, reveals the Shawn Colvin, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Sheryl Crow, and Alanis influences; it says much that she doesn't suffer by comparison to any of them. Balancing the piano accompanied delicacy of Butterfly and the mid-paced yearning of Swimming Upstream with the choppy rocking Carnival Attraction and its behind the celebrity polaroids theme, she doesn't make any false steps, but at the same time you get the feeling that if she's going to secure the exposure and success she merits then, if Radio 2 don't step up to the mark, it's going to be America that will lead the way.