*** June Tabor

ALEYN

(Green Linnet)

If Richard Thompson is England's prince of gloom, then Tabor is England's icy princess. Her tightly controlled alto has grown deeper and darker as she's reached the half-century mark, but the Oxford-educated vocalist still glides from traditional balladry to smoky pop with the impeccable taste she's demonstrated since her mid-'70s debut, Silly Sisters, with Steeleye Span's Maddy Prior. Aleyn's ominous opener, "The Great Valerio," is more suspenseful than Linda & Richard Thompson's original -- there's no net to catch falling lovers in June's bleak view. "Bentley and Craig" addresses in six minutes the controversial case of capital punishment that was the subject of the film Let Him Have It. But there is a merrier respite in "Fair Maid of Islington," an 18th-century number that revels in ribald double entendres.

-- Bruce Sylvester

(June Tabor performs tonight, October 23, at the Museum of Out National Heritage.)