KATHRYN Williams spent only £80 recording her first album, Dog Leap Stairs, an acoustic folk-smoked record of northern introspection. Her second cost less than £3,000, expanded her musical palette, and brought her a Mercury Music Prize nomination and a distribution deal with East West for her DIY label, Caw Records. The bill has gone up to £30,000 for Old Low Light - she has been able to pay her acoustic musician friends the going rate this time - and if it not tenfold better than Little Black Numbers, then album number three takes bigger strides forward than Beth Orton on Daybreaker. Kathryn, a Liverpudlian who studied art in Newcastle and stayed there, sings tenderly and with understatement, her songs full of quietly piercing insights, their simple beauty masking a sting in the tales of Mirrorball, No One Takes You Home and Wolf. Anyone still on a quest for an adult update of Tracey Thorn's Hull University navel-gazing classic, A Distant Shore, has found their new nirvana.

Lost In Space might have been an apt album title for Aimee Mann's last studio record, Bachelor No 2. Rejected by her record company of the time, it hung around in a black hole until being released defiantly by Aimee via the Internet, and was granted a proper launch only in the wake of her soundtrack for the movie Magnolia. No such problems now for this spiky, story-telling American songwriter whose latest collection of X-rays of the soul addresses themes of addiction, failed connections and isolation with her customary risk-taking, complex attitude. She is still too one paced, a weakness exposed even more by the sonic chill of her arrangements, but the likes of Humpty Dumpty, Guys Like Me and The Moth search for warmth in all that space.

Updated: 09:01 Thursday, October 03, 2002