Album: Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, Is It the Sea? (Domino)

Most live albums are little more than cash-ins bridging the lacunae between studio releases. But, once in a while, a performance involves such a radical reinterpretation of familiar material that it is renovated by the new approach, acquiring extra, unexpected resonances.

From such a performance comes Is It the Sea?, recorded in Edinburgh on Will Oldham's spring 2006 UK tour. It's not the first time he's revisited his back catalogue, though the "straight" country renderings on 2004's Bonnie "Prince" Billy Sings Greatest Palace Music, spruced up for broader public consumption, didn't in all honesty serve the material quite as well as the more flyblown, ramshackle originals.

Here, the drones and close harmonies of Scottish folk sextet Harem Scarem and the subtle percussive detailing provided by Alex Neilson add further layers of mystery to their often enigmatic character, along with a haunted quality that brings them even more vividly to life. On the traditional song "Molly Bawn", the melodeon and fiddles achieve a skirling momentum akin to Fairport's classic "A Sailor's Life"; while elsewhere, the girls' striking high harmonies add a whole range of new associations to Oldham's dark materials.

Sometimes, it's just a trace, like the counterpoint that lends "Cursed Sleep" a new, raga-like edge in the manner of Grace Slick, or the Appalachian mountain-music style descant that brings an appropriate revival-tent fervour to "Arise Therefore". But there are more radical intrusions, as in the harmonies accompanying the opening "Minor Place", which despite conjuring up images of The Andrews Sisters brought up on a Scottish croft, still sound quite natural, affirming the Celtic spirit of the melody. On the ensuing "Love Comes to Me", they furnish the equivalent of Leonard Cohen's backing angels, sweetly spiking that most provocative of opening gambits, "When the numbers get so high/ Of the dead flying through the sky/ Oh, I don't know why/ Love comes to me".

The arrangements' effects on Oldham's delivery are intriguing. An exquisitely lilting "Bed Is For Sleeping" is capped with a lovely passage of him keening wordlessly over the melodica, and he's considerably more emotive than before on "Minor Place" and the hypnotic "Birch Ballad". But the extra voices seem to intrude upon his solitude in "Wolf Among Wolves", and it's arguable whether the bleaker tone on "Ain't You Wealthy? Ain't You Wise?" works to advantage. But it's impossible not to be enchanted by "Is It the Sea?", whose harmonies resemble a more piquantly discordant version of "Knocking On Heaven's Door", illuminating unglimpsed spiritual depths within the song.

Pick of the Album: 'Is It the Sea?', 'Minor Place', 'Love Comes to Me', 'Molly Bawn', 'Bed Is For Sleeping'