The three sisters, Greta, Stella and Sunniva Bondesson, who comprise Baskery, last released an album in 2018, Coyote And Sirens, and toured extensively in support of the album. Originally from Sweden, the trio by then lived in three different countries and when it came time to record a follow up album they were hamstrung by the Covid lockdown. Unlike many other artists who resorted to remote recording the sisters bided their time, each using their enforced isolation to write their own songs. Come the time it was safe again to mingle, they worked up the songs and decamped to Devon to record V: End Of the Bloodline with Sean Lakeman (The Levellers, Imelda May, Equation, Billy Bragg) in the producer’s seat. The sisters had met him when they toured with his brother Seth Lakeman and Seth appears on two of the songs here, playing viola.
Harking back to the coyotes named in the previous album, this disc is quite feral with the sisters rattling out of the traps on many of the songs. The most ferocious is Miss America which is whipped along with healthy doses of slide guitar and rattletrap percussion allowing the trio to sound like a love child of Tom Petty and The Violent Femmes. The opening song, Wolf Hook, while not as wild, finds them prowling in a southern swampish style with just the merest hint of Fleetwood Mac voodoo in its veins.
At times the band veers just a little too close to Stevie Nicks’ like chanteusing but they never fully fall into that trap. Little Lonesome Hate (with Seth Lakeman joining in) is a fully fledged slice of Child like balladry with the sisters playing excellently as the song takes flight while A Little Goes A Long Way is suffused with California power pop guitar. They close the album with some excellent sisterly harmonising on the rather gorgeous Birds Of Passage.