THE follow-up to Old Low Light was ready for recording but Kathryn Williams was feeling cynical and detached.

In her words, she needed help to "fall in love with music again", and help came in the form of this covers' album, a record prompted by Williams performing Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah and Jackson Browne's These Days at Regents Park Open Air Theatre.

Playing back those recordings at home in Newcastle, she settled initially upon a covers' EP but the list of songwriters grew like the EC: Neil Young, Tim Hardin, Lou Reed's Candy Says, Pavement's Stephen Malkmus, even Scottish eccentric Ivor Cutler and saucy old Mae West. Williams sings in that feather-soft, unhurried, whispering way of hers, her woody, acoustic arrangements not dissimilar to the newly fashionable Jolie Holland. Yet she can still surprise, either in her choice of ballad, such as her quietly disturbing, strung-up take on Kurt Cobain's All Apologies or The Bee Gees' I Started A Joke, or in the sudden power of her singing on Hallelujah (a change of vocal gear she should engage more often).

Relations is not radical in the manner of Tori Amos's reading of men's songs about women on 2001's Strange Little Girls, but this "home study course in music appreciation" has elicited delightfully close relations with the likes of David Bentley's In a Broken Dream and the halcyon haze of Roger McGuinn's The Ballad Of Easy Rider.

Updated: 09:36 Thursday, May 20, 2004