Kate Westbrook returns with the Granite band that so powerfully debuted with the album of that name. But where Granite was an evocation of the terrifying beauty of Westbrook's beloved Cornwall, Earth Felt The Wound takes similar themes – of Nature huge, indifferent and mortally wounded by man – and expands them to epic, Miltonesque, scale.

The difference is most obviously pointed up in the treatment of Berlin's ‘Let's Face the Music and Dance’. On Granite, the song closes the album in lyric style, Kate whistling winsome against found birdsong and the echoing of a granite quarry. On Earth Felt the Wound it's the cry of a wound opening, a defiant yowl against the dying of the light, the last dance on the Titanic.

Not that this world and what we've done to it is without redemption, but consolation is buried full fathoms deep and is often a singular affair. Perhaps a Cinderella innocence will save us (a lovely live arrangement of a Rossini theme), perhaps a Rabelaisian lust for life, summed up in ‘Rooster Rabelais’. But while lonesome seabirds skip and dance (Harding's squalling sax is most apposite on ‘Storm Petrel’), the waters still mass around a drowning world – North keeps it apocalyptic with some Fripp-like chordings – while Coach York's drums crack hurricanoes.

Producer and engineer Auborn and Godfroy somehow summon, as they did on Granite, a world that is both sonically intimate, catching Westbrook's every breathy, wracked or rainbow sweet intonation yet also quarry wide in its range of dynamics. The title of course comes from Milton's Paradise Lost, wherein the best tunes notoriously went to the Devil.

Well, Kate Westbrook just gave him some more.