Here’s a niche release for anyone with a hankering to hear 13th-century French love songs. Alkemie have been performing very early music for a while (even featuring as the soundtrack to the excellent medieval-manuscript-inspired game Pentiment). On this recording they’ve put together a collection of the trouvère music of (mostly) 13th-century France.

A lot of this involves educated reconstruction, of course, given that it’s usually only the melody line that’s survived, leaving performers to tinker with accompaniments in all kinds of ways. Alkemie here offer plenty of colours with their vielles, lyres, recorders, and psalteries, but therein lies the rub – despite the press release arguing that they take influence not only from historical performance practice but also from bluegrass and Celtic music, some of it ends up sounding a little cartoonish (I’ve also heard performances of this music that sound like they could have been written yesterday, and that’s not the case here). Instead, it feels a bit like you’re watching a rather earnest BBC documentary about medieval life with music in the background.