A truly distinctive and intriguing debut, Broom, Briars, Torches From The Fire is a document of a band with disparate influences which they are yet able to assimilate into a multi-faceted and yet ultimately coherent whole. Juniper Leaf take in folk, ’60s psychedelia, and contemporary rock and covering lyrical ground ranging from the creepily, dreamily fantastical to the slyly political. This is a varied and impressive release, let down only by a somewhat misguided closing track.

So let’s deal with that first. ‘King William’s Lady’ is a sparse seven-minute narrative folk ballad which apparently has some connection to ’60s folk revivalist Martin Carthy, and may also have some connection to an old song called ‘Lady Margaret and King William’. I’m always initially sceptial of long closing tracks on albums – it often seems as though bands put them on because they feel obliged to, and people frequently do a poor job of things they do only through a sense of obligation. Juniper Leaf’s performance of ‘King William’s Lady’ is hardly a disaster – it’s certainly listenable – but it feels like an odd rejection of the rest of the record’s style, like something unnecesarily tacked on.

So what is missing from that song which enriches the rest of the album? Well, Juniper Leaf display a knack for creating a singular atmosphere. Instrumentally, they use a lot of organ for background texture. Delicately plucked acoustic guitars make an appearance on most tracks, either as the predominant song on the more overtly folk songs or as the core of gentler interludes in the louder, rockier songs. Rupert Brown’s idiosyncratic vocals are also key to the slightly dark, twisted atmosphere Juniper Leaf can summon on these songs. He sounds unlike anyone else, somehow both mildly lazy sounding and with a great deal of dynamism, not least in his sudden slides into falsetto. He is part singer, part guide to the odd, unpredictable world his band have created.

Take ‘Pencarrow Head’, for example. Nestled near the middle of the album, this track opens with a crackling spoken sample which falls away to reveal a mildly unsettling psych-folk piece about the “drowning” of a titular place, which presumably refers to the Pencarrow Head on North Island in New Zealand, where there is a lighthouse which may have inspired the title of ‘Lighthouse’, the previous track. Elsewhere, there is ‘Who Knows Where’, one of the rockier tracks which also contains perhaps the albums best moment, a stirring chorus of “I know it sounds silly but let’s celebrate / let’s celebrate clean air / while we’ve got time enough to spare”. On the contrary, this sudden launch into the anthemic sounds not silly but simply unexpected and welcome – like much of Broom, Briars, Torches From the Fire.

The fact that such a song comes at the height of the album’s superb second half makes that misguided closer all the more frustrating, especially given that it is ‘Left Outside the Loop’ which arguably should have closed the album, so wonderfully does that song come to a climax. Small niggles and a curious tracklisting decision aside, this is a strange and often thrilling record which deserves attention. I’d wager that we’ll hear better folk records before the year is out; better rock records too. But I’m not convinced that we’ll find the two fused as impressively as they are here, and that’s a more than worthy achievement in itself.