The Road to the West

The debut album by this Belfast artist is middle-of-the-pack singer/songwriter-type stuff, drawing on folk-rock but also including colors from country music and more straightforward, harder rock. Holmes sings with a clear-voiced reserve, and though the record sounds very much in the singer/songwriter style, actually she's almost purely an interpretive artist, which just one composing credit among the dozen tracks ("Gone," co-written with Colin Henry). Otherwise the album's devoted to covers of songs by Paul Carrack, Isaac Guillory, Bert Jansch, the Smiths, Lyle Lovett, and Terry Woods (veteran of Sweeney's Men, Steeleye Span, the Woods Band, and the Pogues), along with a few songs by Colin Harper, who also plays acoustic guitar on several selections. She uses a rotating cast of accompanists, the most famous of them being Henry McCullough (formerly of Wings and the Grease Band), who plays on a couple tracks. They create an agreeable low-key sound, but it also tends toward the bland and nondescript, approaching out-and-out rock energy with "Letting Go," yet also sliding toward bathetic adult contemporary pop on "Love Will Keep Us Alive."