Being one of much-loved Bella Union’s latest cohorts comes with a certain degree of expectation. Lone Wolf (formally Paul Marshall) releases his second album The Devil And I into a cannon of existing material where it will find itself more than one bedfellow from the label’s current roster of Stephanie Dosen, Midlake, John Grant et al.

From the opening bars of ‘This is War’ the malevolent darkness which permeates Marshall’s sophomore stakes its claim: “I slaughtered her a cow and I’m a vegetarian / It’s not man enough for her / Not bloody enough.” Marshall’s almost theatrical vocal is delivered, like a man pleading for his life, over simple electric piano before brass blasts from the parapet and marching drums lift the track into a rousing finale.

There’s a quality to The Devil And I which is distinctly English, and it’s not just Marshall’s unaffected vocal delivery. His virtuoso finger picking style coupled with the arrangements of strings and brass bring to mind the collaboration of Nick Drake and his production / arrangement team of Joe Boyd and Paul Kirby. With this in mind it’s no wonder that comparisons to purveyors of ‘proper folk’ such as Fairport Convention’ ring true. The Side B opening pairing of ‘The Devil and I (Part 1)’ into ‘Russian Winter’ demonstrates this perfectly; the former a sinister piano line, pulled straight from the perpetually pirouetting ballerina in a music box, joined by maudlin strings and funeral march drums; the latter a deftly finger picked affair accompanied by shivering strings and sparse piano.

That said, there is perhaps a little more polish on the production than is perhaps needed; vocals are often double-tracked, drums are slick to the point of sounding programmed. For a record so steeped in the influence of traditional folk it would have been nice for things to have been a little frayed at the edges. I imagine that when performed live this album is nothing but arresting, a quality which is perhaps lost here through not knowing when to put the production brush down. It’s often the case that the most affecting tracks are those which have been kept simple (‘We Could Use Your Blood’, ’15 Letters’, ‘Dead River’).

On his second album – or Lone Wolf’s first – Marshall has created work which is bold, assured and focused. It’s dark, foreboding and centred around a theme from which it does not let up. There’s a great deal to be digested, and not just musically; I’ve avoided the temptation of saturating this review in the record’s endlessly quotable lyrics, as choosing a small handful would be unfair to those left unmentioned. It looks like that in Lone Wolf it looks like Bella Union have yet another string to add to their bow.

Lone Wolf: ’15 Letters’