Two extraordinary releases out of England's current folk revival, Hidden Seam and Single Flame spotlight the voices of Lucy Ward and Lisa Knapp, a young woman and a slightly older woman applying strikingly creative approaches to sounds based in the tradition. If the music nods broadly to older forms, it is never anything but robustly modern, a launching of folk music -- or at least an idea of it -- into new, albeit not quite wholly unfamiliar, realms. For all its contemporary quality, no sensible listener would confuse this with pop or rock. While the material is mostly self-composed, the sound always feels like "folk," even if at moments confoundingly, and like nothing else.

Ward, in her early 20s, sings from a deep, dark district of the psyche, her words dense and dire. Here and there, one can hear -- as in the apocalyptic "The Last Pirouette" and the searing, unaccompanied "The Consequence" -- something like the Linda Thompson of the Richard & Linda Thompson era as she channeled her then-husband's dyspeptic lyrics. But it is the late Sandy Denny, whose fame and influence have expanded steadily since her death in 1978, who is the most consistent audible inspiration. Yet Ward's artistry is such that it lets her absorb detectable influences, filter them through her own vision and fashion them (with the help of producer Stu Hanna) into a rich, mesmerizing sound that commands its own authority.

Still, it is something of a shock to encounter this as the album's very first line: "We sung the songs of Safka / Candles in the rain." I am surprised that someone so young has even heard of the pop singer Melanie, who did not use her last name, and her immense hit "Candles in the Rain," a Woodstock-hippie anthem that must have been the most played song on AM radio in the summer of 1970. I hated the song -- many did -- and dismissed her as the bubble-gum Joni Mitchell, Many did that, too. To us, Melanie was a voice on the radio, not the voice of a generation. Then again, it's been a long time. Maybe Ward, born in 1989 and possessed of fresher ears than mine, is hearing something I didn't. Anyway, "I Cannot Say I Will Not Speak" goes on to become a tough, effective song. Its subject might be described as the responsibility of each succeeding generation to speak out for social justice. Melanie, bless her heart, did that, too, in her own way.

Single Flame is intellectually packed enough to merit a whole lot of attention. Ward also offers up a couple of interestingly reworked traditionals, "Lord, I Don't Want to Die in the Storm" and "Marching in the Green Grass,"in arrangements so idiosyncratic that I didn't immediately recognize them as antique songs. The album concludes with the beautiful "Shellback," said to be the first song Ward wrote. The mind reels.

And then there's Lisa Knapp. Hidden Seam -- a phrase coined by the late folksong scholar A.L. Lloyd to express his conviction that traditional musics cross political borders to speak a kind of common cultural language -- is a recording of enormous reach. Produced by Knapp's husband Gerry Diver (co-writer with her of most of the songs), it is dense in both the lyric and the engineering definitions, but not suffocatingly cluttered. In other words, the musicality of the project, however curious or unexpected, cannot be in question.

The oddness commences with the first cut, the decidedly peculiar "Shipping Song," which is not a little like singing the phone book. The opening lyrics parody the United Kingdom's venerable Shipping Report, a regular radio broadcast of weather information intended for ships off the coast of that island nation. Much of the rest of the album evokes images from nature in ways that sometimes recall, at least in other musicians, Robin Williamson. Another young folksinger-songwriter with a debt to Williamson, Scotland's brilliant Alasdair Roberts, appears on "Hunt the Hare," in two parts (tracks 7 and 8), helping Knapp in her continuing fascination with the folklore of (in the stock phrase) "the merry month of May."

Besides Roberts, other folk guest stars include revival patriarch Martin Carthy, Marry Waterson and Kathryn Williams. The one non-original song, "Black Horse," is a trad-accented -- though hardly trad-arranged -- piece by the late Lal Waterson, who was Marry's mother. The eerie and unsettling "Two Ravens," from an image one associates with the eerie and unsettling "Twa Corbies" (Child 26), imagines rapacious birds tearing at memory, symbolizing the depredations of Alzheimer's disease. Meaning no sick pun, this is not a forgettable song.

Nor is this a forgettable album. Huge ambitions are not routinely realized as keenly as they are here. Lesser talents than Knapp and Diver probably could not have conceived them even if only to fail them. Neither it nor Single Flame will leave you soon.