Natasha Lee, Journalist

Don’t let the repetitive arc of the first single from the album, Alive, fool you. The Empire are back, in all their grandiose glory.

As the album proves, heartache, it seems, suits Tunstall to a tee.

Steady, simple and beautiful, The Ash And Clay is heartache-soothing material that proves folk is not dead.

The cheek and breeze of their earlier material, like 2011’s Roller Disco and 2010’s Hey, are sorely missing, only to have been replaced by an addiction to a samey-samey disco-inspired chord progression, a shtick that just gets plain boring by the end.

The tunes lack the versatility of her earlier releases, giving the album a ‘this song sounds kinda like the last one’ feel.