Sadly, we live in a world that thinks a pretty girl with an acoustic guitar automatically equals boring (another thing Barack Obama can try and find time to sort out).

It means Jesca Hoop, once a nanny to Tom Waits’s children, may lose out on a potential army of fans. Those who persevere with her though, will enjoy a brilliant talent whose songs are nothing short of folk-pop masterpieces adorned with wit, freedom, warmth and intelligence.

This EP is breathtakingly good. Two songs locate her as a songwriter worthy of comparison with the grand dame of peculiar feminine folky wiles, Joanna Newsom. ‘Murder of Birds’ evokes that same simple bygone beauty but with an added accessibility and more immediate bite. Then the particularly emotive ‘Intelligentactile 101’ has a chorus with such harmonies and chord changes as to devastate the most cynical of hearts, and with lines about wanting to “study you with my tongue”, this is clearly no Vashti Bunyan. This is stunning.

Barnaby Smith