The Furrow Collective are a bleakly charming and intriguing curiosity. All four members are well-known in the British folk scene for their songwriting, solo work or membership in other bands, and have the ability to cover an impressive range of musical territory. But with this project they have decided to concentrate on dark and quirky traditional songs, and treat them with deliberately sparse backing.

They started out with the first four tracks from their debut album (though not in the same sequence), with each taking it in turn to provide the lead vocals. First came Emily Portman, who is celebrated for her songwriting but here provided a cool treatment of King Henry, a gently spooky traditional story of shape-changing and bewitchment, for which she was backed by her own banjo-playing, fiddle from Lucy Farrell, acoustic guitar from Alasdair Roberts and harp from Rachel Newton. Right from the start, the Collective demonstrated the subtle four-part harmonies that make them so distinctive. Next came Roberts, showing off his high, soulful vocals on another suitably bleak song, The Outlaw of the Hill, about a rebel awaiting hanging. Then Farrell took over on another gallows song, with Portman now on concertina, before Newton proved that she too is a fine singer, as well as a virtuoso harpist.

The aim was to keep the music simple, but there were experiments, from a subtle merging of the songs Handsome Molly and Our Captain Calls, to a treatment of the Scottish mining disaster song, The Blantyre Explosion, in which Roberts and his guitar were backed by the female chorus. They performed every song on their album, and added in new versions of old folk favourites, including Roberts’s soulful treatment of Sir Patrick Spens and Portman’s powerfully intimate Barbara Allen. They are unassuming, maybe, but this is a quietly classy band.