Album: Sex And Gasoline, Rodney Crowell (Yep Roc)

Rodney Crowell's recent vein of fine form continues with this Joe Henry-produced album, which shifts his gaze to the territory of relationships.

Over a series of gently scudding country-rock arrangements, he surveys the sexual landscape, from the brutish lothario trying to persuade a younger girl that "this mean old world runs on sex and gasoline" all the way to the devoted spouse coping with a partner's Alzheimer's in the heartbreaking "40 Winters": "I'll bathe you and feed you and tend to your grace/But don't make me leave you in such a dark place".

The other outstanding track is "The Rise And Fall Of Intelligent Design", in which Crowell imagines himself a woman, trying to judge himself objectively. "Maybe I could find out if I'm a half-decent man," he muses, "or if I'm just a joke."

On this showing, half-decent doesn't tell the half of it.