After just two gigs at London's Bunjies, a former haunt of Bowie and Dylan, Youell and her co-songwriter Richard Murray found themselves playing to ten-million residents of Guangzou, China, on the Pearl River radio station, before returning home to spearhead the musical promo for Sky TV's Ryder Cup golf coverage, then embarking on a sterling run in a national newspaper "Star of Tomorrow" competition.

Heady stuff, but thankfully there's as little euphoria here as in Mrs Claypool's undergarments. As a songwriter Viv Youell has many virtues, but it's a certain enigmatic otherness that makes her more worthy a proposition than any award ceremony contestant. Her songwriting is full of emotional quirks and poetic innovations, and from the opening acoustic guitar strains of Smile, Firelogic fires unceasingly towards the stars.

In the critic's handbook, "epic" can be a dubious term and reference-points are a man's best friend, but in both cases here conventions are defied. Youell excels in trapping emotional intensity and pouring it out in shimmering, labyrinthine acoustic guitar numbers, in doing so naturally pushing the borders of taste and tempting one to confess all manner of sins.

Many people were big fans of Belinda Carlisle, and Youell's voice, all fervent emotion and piquant tremolo, evokes Carlisle in what would have been her ideal context, minus the balladry-by-numbers. Meanwhile, an electric guitar solo in Love in the Afternoon momentarily sounds like Clapton has got himself a credit, before it shoots off on timely, glimmering pop tangents.

Firelogic teems with songwriting innovations expressed in their humblest forms, and the spoken-word poem at the end of Pebbles along with the fairytale poignancy of Catherine comes from the deepest reaches of Youell's soul, but further zeniths are reached when the songs are left to open out all the way like petals in the sun.

Hearts and Arrows and Love in the Afternoon are soundtracks to the best summers you ever had, working their ways off gentle acoustic riffs into underplayed refrains and coming together like the greatest pop should, effortless and romantic, and Still Waters, with its sparkling, reflective shimmer, twists and wraps itself around you with the kind of warmth that defines Youell as something special.

It's been a vintage year for new female alt folk troubadours, and we can safely count Firelogic up there with Kat Flint's The Secret Boys Club EP and Catherine Feeny's Hurricane Glass. It came around the scenic route, but got here just in time.

share

end of year feature musicOMH's 50 Best Albums Of 2009 From the nearly 700 albums we reviewed this year, which did our writers love the most? Introduction 50-41 | 40-31 | 30-21 20-11 | 10-4 | 1-3