I imagine Gemma Williams experienced a kind of epiphany that forced her to stop and rethink when saw realised she was heading down the blind alley of 'twee folk'.
Her silly stage name and childlike voice are at odds with the musical experience of this beguiling album which can be likened to entering what seems to be an idyllic garden only to find it full of venomous insects. Or, since each of the seven tracks on this album are named after birds, perhaps there are other flying creatures to destroy the tranquillity.
The record's strangeness can, in part, be put down to Williams' unconventional background.
She is a keen beekeeper from Brighton who trained as a midwife until being struck down by a 'mystery illness' and turning to music as a kind of Shamanic therapy.
All seems a cosy and reassuring listen at first. Red Kite begins with a pretty plucked harp and tremulous voice that could have been lifted straight out of Joanna Newsom's Book Of Right On. It seems like a quirky but tender love song until she sings "you were wearing the very same pin I've been wearing since our last night when you smashed my face in".
Stop..........rewind..........what was that line again? .......... Did I hear right?
The song continues with a reference to a figure pressing down on her and "your fingers around my throat" and you know you have to hastily revise your first impressions.
It remains a deceptively pretty tune but these references to male violence make it creepy and disturbing.
Gull is equally double-edged, combining mundane details like meals of "egg chips and beans" on a "polka dot tablecloth" with a less homely image of her "wretched life". The serene acoustic backing is subject to some glitchy effects but does not prepare you for the full on onslaught of the next track, Sparrow.
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Here the quaint folkiness is entirely replaced by a drum machine, a maelstrom of electro-noise and screeching vocals direct from the freak zone. It's a radical reframing of Dolly Parton's 'Little Sparrow', a song which blithely warned "fair young maidens" to be on their guard against "false hearted lovers".
WW's Sparrow is not so sedate and includes atonal noise like a dentist's drill as she positively spits out the lines "You're so goddamn pretty, You're so goddamn sweet, You're so goddamn saccharine" as if to render all niceties obsolete.
Magpie is quieter but while she addresses "my bonnie bonnie boy", we know by now to take any sugary allusions to traditional folk with a pinch of salt.
Crow adds to the intensity by building to a menacing climax of pure noise with a foreign sounding voice reading out numbers, the clearest of which is 'zero'.
The final two songs, Dove and Hummingbird, don't quite have the edge of the earlier tracks but this hardly matters as wavering listeners will have been won over by this point.
Despite a playing time of just 29 minutes this eccentric and intense album is so brimful of ideas that you want to prolong the experience by pressing the 'play again' button.
Woodpecker Wooliams' Website
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