Emily, Jessica and Camilla Stavely-Taylor, or The Staves for short, add further support for the adage that sibling harmonies are hard to surpass. Two years ago the Hertfordshire trio were gracing Tom Jones’s Praise and Blame; last year they lent subtle shading to Fionn Regan’s ‘North Star Lover’. The Mexico EP followed, but 2012 has been their breakout year.

A woven oneness of lustre and poise, the sisters’ velvety vocals are arresting from the start. Limpid and unaccompanied, the album’s opening stanzas hang in the air like night lights. Called ‘Wisely and Slow’, the first track fulfils its billing: pared to the bare vocals until an organ sneaks into the mix in the second minute.

With vocals of such effortless prowess, the songs themselves must play catch up at times. This is often achieved with aplomb – structures are simple, fragments dressed and stitched, and the subtle production affords the singing just the right prominence. The feverish folk rock of single ‘Tongue Behind My Teeth’ makes for the most irresistible offering, the mounting intensity and asserted threat (“And I know it would do no good/But I’d hurt you if I could”) delivering a cumulatively catchy, theatrical listen. Running fast without a stumble, this is a song that treads softly but kicks ever so effectively.

The album’s Opener and closer dogleg to great satisfaction – ‘Wisely and Slow’ rising to sweeping insistence; ‘Eagle Song’ breaking from its ponderous, oh-me-oh-my meander to a memorable chorus – but in between there’s the slightest tendency to rest on vocals if not laurels. ‘Pay Us No Mind’ is typical of some of the less stand-out arrangements, languid but lyrically fierce. The f-word is dropped here, the sort of en passant swear that smacks of lazy phrasing, but because the emotion isn’t overdone, it doesn’t seem to matter.

Some of the songwriting winks at nu-folk behemoths. Flashes of Johnny Flynn’s ‘Leftovers’ flicker through guitar lines in ‘Gone Tomorrow’ and ‘In the Long Run’, while the ‘The Motherlode pitches a little like a Mumfords ship (albeit without arena-orientated embellishments): with a rhythmic rise and fall under plaintive lyrics of kingdoms and rivers and running away. Laura Marling’s influence is the most pervasive, and most evident on ‘Snow’, which could have been penned by the 22 year old when she was making her own breakthrough. “I know I will never belong, belong to anyone”, sing the sisters, assertions of independence peppering their ponderings and declamations alike. In fact ‘Snow’ rather goes against the grain, where “the shame is mine and the blame is my own to bear”. Elsewhere, fault is more liberally apportioned. ‘Winter Trees’ offers “I was wrong” and “you were blind”, concluding unabashed that “I couldn’t love you any less than I do now”. Marling’s formidable craft has reached higher plains but The Staves also sing soul-searching relationship songs, not love songs: Ro-me-oh-my would be too sugared a pill.

The nostalgic sound recalls older influences too, and the band align themselves, quite rightly, with the intricate harmonising of CSN more than any of the nu-folk brigade. Impressively for such a familiar sounding record, they are for the most part able to escape the calling cards and cornerstones of their peers. The title track is so sparing it stays wonderfully away from paths well-worn, the elegant and elegiac simplicity casting off any sense of recollection: “All we have is here and now today/And I’ll stay the same and stand here on my own/Till everything is dead and born and grown”.

The Staves could become a sort of British Wailin’ Jennys (without the personnel changes, one hopes) – a live rendition of ‘Silver Dagger’ featured on a previous EP and a splash of tradition would open up another frontier. This album is resolute and classy, if not so instantly venerable as 40 Days, and the Stavely-Taylor sisters are not yet stretched by their material. Nevertheless, winsome singing and enough winning songs make Dead & Born & Grown a graceful proposition and comfortable listen, ascending from pleasant to majestic at its very best.

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