Today, whimsical female singer-songwriters are a dollar a dozen ”“ a person can’t turn around without being assaulted by hordes of sweetly unassuming females, swathed in floral prints and brandishing guitars and gently-lilting ditties about cups of tea and bicycles ”“ however, if you are going to devote your attention to just one folky female, it might as well be unfathomably precocious 19 year old Helen Page ”“ aka Paperplain ”“ who’s debut album Entering Pale Town is as gently buoyant as her chosen alias.Refreshingly enough, on Entering Pale Town, Helen makes no excuses for her fancifulness ”“ she wears her cross-stitched heart on her cardigan sleeves, making Entering Pale Town’s twee aesthetic so utterly absorbing, it’s impossible not to allow yourself to drift off into a sepia-tinted, pleasantly snug daydream ”“ something akin to the centrespread of a Cath Kidston catalogue.Sometimes this blissful state of torpidity works for Paperplain ”“ ‘Rescue Boat’s gently-ebbing melody recalls an adolescent Kimya Dawson, minus her often devastating bouts of cynicism, or even Kate Nash, minus that supremely intolerable mockney drawl - however, Paperplain fares best when veering slightly out of her comfort zone ”“ ‘Foreign Fingers’ sees Helen come across like Laura Marling dosed to the eyeballs with Prozac, lightly skimming the surface of a relationship fretted with all kinds of moral dilemmas ”“ "I know that your girlfriend is home on her own / But you’re not in the country so nobody knows / We’ve had nine or ten now so don’t close your eyes / But I’m not sure we’ll sleep great with a whole stream of lies". She even swaps the infernal cups of tea for gin, ye gads.In the end, Entering Pale Town's eventual downfall is its ceaseless vagueness ”“ Paperplain seems incapable of making a statement without wrapping it in dulling, cotton-wool swathes of gaucheness ”“ and it’s this lack of lyrical assertiveness that renders Entering Pale Town merely pleasant, rather than genuinely affecting. However, it’d be foolish to write off a debut that is, all things considered, still a solid achievement for one so young ”“ and it’s more than likely that in a few short years, Helen will return with an album that will pierce through the heart, rather than drifting, inoffensively, in one ear and out the other.mp3:> Paperplain: "Foreign Fingers"