Ladies and Gentleman, we have a winner. Without a doubt, the finest record to come out of Oxford this year must be Witches’ ‘Heart of Stone’, a record that is alternately and simultaneously beautiful, mysterious, violent, plaintive and wondrous. Four or five tracks could be Radio 1 hits, but the peculiar excellence is the consistency of the vision and near-perfection of the execution.

The band was put together by ex-eeebleee frontman Dave Griffiths, but the musicians he has found create a sound-world far from that band’s anxious electronica. The emphasis now is on traditional instruments, and indeed Witches are regular magpies when it comes to instrumentation, with glockenspiel, harpsichord and trumpet making important contributions to many songs. Production values are high and the producers have been careful to limit the exposure of the more outlandish instruments: these are emphatically genuine songs and not vehicles for experiments in sound.

An example of this control comes in the opening ‘Lost Without’. The first couple of minutes are given over to an attractively wasted guitar-based ballad which then builds steadily into an ecstatic trumpet solo. By holding back the trumpet, the band keeps the interest growing, rather than blowing all their ideas at the start. ‘Josef’s lament’ is a little more uptempo, with a tense electric guitar part which could have come from the Polly Harvey classic ‘Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea’. Again trumpeter Benek Chylinski shines, with a striking trumpet riff which Ennio Morricone would have been proud to call his own punctuating Griffith’s hushed singing. Richard Thomas’s percussive harpsichord adds further chills to one of the most potent songs I’ve heard in ages.

‘Putting you back in the ground’ has an almost nursery-rhyme universality and Griffiths’ vocals are superbly bleak and cracked. His is not a voice that everyone will love, but for rendering stories of loss and remembrance I can hardly think of better. His lyrics are not sophisticated: all of that quality has been poured into the music. That said, the supernatural themes of the album are an important unifying feature; they are clearly not of the Halloween, pantomime-devil type beloved of metal monsters everywhere.Griffiths’ ghosts are Ibsen’s ghosts: aggressive elements from the past that invade the present life and try all too successfully to bring it to a halt.

There are many more highlights: the gorgeous ‘Sleep like the Witch that You Are’ sounds like The Band playing The Pixies while the title track offers a lovely melody and even some measured optimism. But to be honest, despite the doom-laden lyrics running through the album, the whole record is a statement of optimism: that even in 2007 pop music can still surprise, inspire and delight.