Album: John Doe

Dim Stars, Bright Sky, iMusic/BMG

Popular music is built on paradoxes. Most country music is made and consumed by city-dwellers;the blues is often designed to dispel sadness. Likewise, the saddest songs are often the most uplifting. Compare the epiphanic grace and power of Al Green's earlier soul period, when he was suffering the pain of deprivation, with the limp satisfaction of his subsequent gospel period, when he was fulfilled – there's no contest as to which lifts the spirit more.

So it is with this solo album from John Doe, former grey eminence behind the Los Angeles punk pioneers X. Dim Stars, Bright Sky is one of the most melancholy song collections you'll ever hear, yet it leaves you feeling cheerier. It's to do with transcendence, with the way that Doe's desire to bring poetic illumination to his theme – the things that keep us together and tear us apart – both validates and ameliorates the sadness at its core. It's a form of what Nietzsche called "aesthetic reinterpretation", brought to us by an alt.rock legend whose own star has seen brighter times.

Produced by Doe with Joe Henry and Dave Way, using a session crew that includes the REM drummer Joey Waronker and the former Was (Not Was) keyboardist Jamie Muhoberac, and featuring Aimee Mann, Jakob Dylan and Juliana Hatfield as backing vocalists, Dim Stars, Bright Sky has a diffident alt.country demeanour reminiscent of Elliott Smith, with emotional knots underscored by acoustic guitar, piano, ghostly organ and pedal steel guitar. The songs deal with moments of departure, the distance between partners, and regret at a loved one's self-destructive urges. "I hate to see you down in that bathroom, you're so much better than that," Doe notes in "Backroom", while "7 Holes" is full of observations that imply more than is stated, such as "I never did drink like you/ But I held your hair like a girlfriend would do" – presumably, while she was being sick.

A wistful piece about the way we strive to avoid emotional honesty, "7 Holes" contains some of Doe's most beautiful lines.Briefly glimpsed revelations are his forte, whether it's the bereft, abandoned lover "down by the freeway, shooting at cars" in "This Far", or the lonely man haunted by an ex-lover's memory in "Still You", seeing her face everywhere – "That's her eyes above his smile/ All set in someone else's face". Sometimes, his pursuit of such moments takes him into uncharted territory, as with the man in "Forever for You" striving to understand his lover: "I wanna be like you/ Crawl inside your skin, feel your clothes from the inside/ But then you'll think that I'm a freak." Not really – just so sensitive it hurts. In the sweetest possible way.