Credit: Found On Internet

We’ve been listening to Angus & Julia Stone for an absolute age in the Music Towers office. We’ve heard a lot of the tracks on ‘A Book Like This’ on previous singles and EPs, so when we finally got hold a copy of the album which has been out in their native Australia for a while now), it is neither a surprise nor a relief to find that the album is of such refined folky class. It’s merely the affirmation of our expectations.

The brother/sister combo have – unsurprisingly – a wordless rapport that allows their vocals to bounce back and force from Angus’ bell-clear earnestness to Julia’s frailer, slightly more ethereal approach. Stand out tracks are the touchingly delicate, Julia-sung, ‘Wasted’, and the lop-sided grin of ‘Stranger’, with Angus’ flirtations with a harmonica providing an acoustic blues tint.

Not since Victoria Bergsman’s Taken By Trees project last year, have we taken to a record so strongly that didn’t come with a Parental Advisory sticker, men doing all sorts of dangerous things with guitars, and/or Slash posing on the photo on the back of the CD. Okay, so a cynic might seize upon the tweeness of ‘A Book Like This’ – but that’s part of its charm. You can’t listen to nothing but breakneck rock’n’roll all day.

What’s more annoying is that there are acres of people out there buying the more plastic-sounding Amy Macdonald, the hairy oaf Newton Faulkner, and the dear-god-rhyming-slang-has-never-been-more-apt nasality of James Blunt. All of these people’s lives would be immeasurably enriched if they exchanged just one of those flaccid MOR Radio 2 staples for an album as accomplished as ‘A Book Like This’

The video for ‘Just A Boy’:

‘A Book Like This’ by Angus & Julia Stone is out now on Flock Music, and they tour the UK from April 14. Click here for more details.