Ruth Theodore: White Holes of Mole Hills

Ruth Theodore is a young singer-songwriter and acoustic guitarist from Southampton whose songs are so quirky and unexpected that it's impossible to imagine anyone else performing them. She may be part of the new folk movement, but her influences cover anything from the folk-blues guitar work of Leo Kottke to jazz-poetry, and she performs with a breathy intensity and constant changes of mood and pace. Snatches of melody are mixed in with what at times sound like spontaneous, stream-of-consciousness passages and sudden instrumental sections that follow none of the more conventional styles of song-writing. And it actually works. False Alarm starts as a thoughtful folk ballad, then picks up speed, with drums joining in, then suddenly stops as she switches to an intense, whispered passage before romping back to the melody, with added clarinets. And so it continues, with Eris mixing bursts of jazzy cabaret with spoken passages, the thoughtful Race Cars switching between the slow and slinky and bursts of rapid-fire vocals, and Sisyphean Rock'n'Roll displaying just as many twists and turns in a guitar instrumental.