GAUTHIER’S pain at discovering she was adopted and then being denied a meeting with her birth mother, whom she finally finds 45 years after her abandonment, informs an album of unalloyed solemnity.

Here, she searches through a journey of loss. Each song comprises lyrics of near-intolerable bleakness – “darkness without dawn”, “clouds are spreading like bruises on the evening sky”, and “I knew I was a lie”. She reveals the forlorn sentiments lacked a core until she found her true mother and Blood Is Blood, where Springsteen-style acoustic melancholy segues into Stones-like electric menace, and Mama Here, Mama Gone are drenched in regret. But all is not defeat.

The Orphan King and even March 11, 1962, a spoken-word song based on a phone conversation, are warmly uplifting.