Bird In The Belly

★★★ After The City

GFM. CD/DL

This Brighton quartet wield an impressive menace and intensity suggestive of medieval horror, stemming largely from lead singers Laura Ward and Ben Webb, whose voices clash in a bizarre yet captivating mix of Ward’s measured elegance and Webb’s gravelly intensity. Appropriately, this album is themed on and inspired by a ‘post-apocalyptic’ novel (After London) written in 1885 by Richard Jefferies, with broadside ballads and adapted poems among the evocative source material.