LAST year Kathryn Williams recorded Relations, an album of covers, to fall in love with music again.

Relations restored her, and the Newcastle-based singer-songwriter has returned to trusted, softly furnished form on her own Caw label.

Indeed, you can't see the joins on her fifth album of jazz-spiked folk blues, partly because the songs were written both before and after the Relations sessions.

Old and new come together in her "cinematic orchestral chamber-pop darkness"; she still sings warmly intimate, gently surprising and everyday adult reflections in hushed, delicate tones but thumping drum beats on Just Like A Birthday are a new addition to counter the traditional cello, double bass and acoustic guitar elsewhere. Her catharsis is complete.

Updated: 12:43 Thursday, May 26, 2005