FOLK

After her triumphant homecoming with the best-selling Sings the Songs of Robert Burns, this new collection finds one of Scotland’s best voices continuing to mine the traditional vein in the company of folk heroes like John McCusker, Phil Cunningham and Donald Shaw.

It’s all lovingly arranged, performed and produced - and in terrible danger of drowning in the warm syrup of 21st-century world music production. Reader’s is not a gritty voice at the best of times, and the album’s disappointing edgelessness is compounded by a dose of the sort of Boo Hewerdine-led pallid pop that gets people campaigning for greater national separation.