Nothing if not ambitious, The Serpent Hit finds the Westbrooks addressing the tiny matter of The Fall of Humankind. The six-song cycle meditates on man’s destruction of innocent pleasure, art, the environment and ultimately the planet. And in Westbrook World there is no God to redeem us. So not exactly a bundle of larfs. We are of course in familiar territory for the Westbrooks and Kate’s text draws deeply on William Blake’s visions of innocence crushed by experience: but the mental fight goes on, and in the splendid quintet that expresses Mike’s music there are intimations that small victories can be won. Biscoe’s alto retains the delicious gift of being simultaneously free and lyrical, while Pearson briskly underwrites the tight ensemble writing. All that’s missing is Street’s absent accordion. But Mike’s writing is not about added colour: rather, the ritualistic repetition of riffs and figures matches the inescapable coiling of the Serpent around all that is good and graceful in the world. Indeed, like Milton, Westbrook gives the best tunes to the Devil, with Kate’s sibilants subtly and supplely slinking through the text. Westbrook’s voice grows stronger precisely because of its frailty: declamatory and dramatic, soaked in Weill, steeped in latter-day Holiday, she makes Marianne Faithful sound like One Direction, but then you don’t do pretty with the world looking down the barrel of a gun.