Angus & Julia Stone - Snow

Snow the album continues a process the siblings began at the suggestion of producer Rick Rubin on their self-titled album of 2014. "That was the first time that we actually started writing together, in the same room, and I guess we took a leaf from that chapter into this record. This time round though, every song on the record we wrote together" Angus says. Plot-wise, Snow is yet another confident advance on a story which now accounts for over half a million album sales in Australia alone.

The Sydney-born siblings produced and largely engineered it themselves, in Angus's cottage studio, Belafonté, in the Byron Bay hinterland. The first notes of Snow are instantly transporting. The guitar is a scratchy, wooden memory laid over a moment of silence. The gently driving organ beat emerges and takes you with it, beginning the next enchanting journey with the brother-sister duo, "Running from the start, here we are again," Julia sings. "Running from the start, here we go again," comes her brother's reply. Chateau is a song of pure contentment in time and place. Nothing Else To Do is a stunning acoustic breeze - "There's nothing else to do here but fall into your arms," Angus and Julia sing in effortless harmony. Cellar Door borrows its title from the film Donnie Darko, its subject drawn from the intensely personal experience of the siblings' grandfather's funeral. On My House Your House, they find a call-and-response groove that paints a shared place viewed from different angles.