Julia Stone – The Memory Machine

Successful brother-sister bands are rare – apart from The Knife and sibship supergroup The Magic Numbers, it seems the creepiness of singing about love with your bro or sis is too off-putting. With our kid Angus, Julia Stone is one of the biggest selling artists in Australia; here she’s split ties to go it alone.

Her slip of a debut album places her in the sylph-like indie folk canon of Laura Marling or Joanna Newsom, but her languid, hesitant, vaguely Scandinavian delivery is more gentle still, almost childish, which transforms the spooky Winter on the Weekend into something genuinely upsetting when she sings: ‘Daddy, why don’t you protect me, someone’s going to hurt me and there’s nothing I can do’.

Things get welcomingly animated on the jaunty Catastrophe – ignore the name – but The Memory Machine is mainly a brooding, sporadically enchanting affair, lingering over broken hearts, lost memories and self-reflection to profound effect. [Euan Ferguson]