Album: The Dutchess & the Duke, Sunset / Sunrise (Hardly Art)

The second album from The Dutchess (sic) & the Duke is a superior 10-song tranche of dusty-booted Americana.

Sunset/Sunrise sticks to a well-worn alt-country palette of remorse, regret and recrimination, and the occasional death ballad. (It ends with a song about drowning and being pecked alive by vultures). Like other recent guy/girl acts, the Seattle duo of Jesse Lortz and Kimberly Morrison make the most of the possibilities of male/ female vocal interplay. A quietly haunting piece of work.