There’s a gentle flow to the first solo album from Liz Overs (part of Chalk Horse Music and once an artist on a major US club hit), a sense of movement across space and time around her native Sussex coast in England. It’s an album filled with stories, some old, others from her own pen, music and tales weaving together to capture the world through her eyes.

The opener, “Prayer To The Year,” is a perfect example. Gently insistent, with its brooding banjo line, it makes an ideal overture. The lyrics evoke nature and the passing of the seasons (All is a tangle of river and root... East of the sunlight and west of the moon), the lodestones that stand at the heart of the album. Like those seasons, this is a disc that unfolds gradually to reveal its full beauty.

The traditional “Cruel Sister” also makes for a fine fit, with death, nature and water coming together, and Overs’s take on the familiar piece makes it her own, her voice fragile, hovering over a backing that slowly grows around her in a simple, yet very effective arrangement.

Quite often, the mood of Nightjar evokes some of the more adventurous 70s artists whose music criss-crossed the border between proper folkie and singer-songwriter. That’s meant as real praise: Overs brings the same joy to her music that they had, and in Neil MacColl, Ben Nicholls and David Tomlins, she has three very sympathetic collaborators to make her vision into a gloriously satisfying reality.

You can almost smell the salt air as Overs takes you by the hand and leads you through her part of England, the music gently dissolving into nature at the close the final title track. It’s the kind of musical journey that’s well worth taking.

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