Album: The Handsome Family

In the mesmerising 2003 album Singing Bones, Brett and Rennie Sparks of The Handsome Family grappled with the way that mythic intimations of mortality obtrude into the everyday - hearing ghosts calling down office corridors and supermarket aisles, and quietly marking the parallels between the besieged wagon-trains of pioneer settlers and the plummeting terror of a modern air disaster.

That continues through parts of Last Days of Wonder, but with a greater focus on the blunt details of contemporary life. In "Your Great Journey", the protagonist - the listener, in the song's unusual second-person narrative - senses he has "begun to dance the ghost dance" when the world starts ignoring him. As lift doors close upon him as if he's not there and buses drive past his stop, he realises he is literally fading from existence. Perhaps he is the ghostly apparition glimpsed by the tormented narrator of "All the Time in Airports", doomed to see his lost love everywhere: "I see you sitting on your suitcase, I see you sleeping in a chair, but each time I get too close, you always disappear". One is brought up short by the aptness of the transient location.

Even when no ghosts are there, the ability to invest the mundane with a spiritual energy is sustained, drawing on traditional folk-tale forms. In the tragic sea-shanty "After We Shot the Grizzly", the last survivor of a disaster-strewn expedition floats on a raft, waiting to meet his love in the afterlife. The fate of the deer stalker in "Hunter Green" echoes that of the doomed protagonist of some traditional folk song: confused when the deer he's shot and the fish he's caught both magically seem to transform into his true love, he holds fire when confronted with a wild boar and is gored to death.

In The Handsome Family's hands, the most mundane of events can be imbued with a numinous intensity, as in the recollection of a graveyard assignation in "White Lights", where banal memories quiver with energy: "There was mystery singing from everything - the strip mall, the highway, the boarded-up skating rink". This could serve as the duo's manifesto. Even songs of more earthbound account, like the mad-scientist tribute of "Tesla's Hotel Room", are lent added depth and resonance, as if they too were stations of some peculiar cross, gestures in a ritual beyond our understanding.

Set to unfussy arrangements of pedal steel, banjo, organ and guitar, with a few details provided by poignant horns or bowed saw, these songs are deceptively undemonstrative, returning to American country music some of its spiritual mystery.

DOWNLOAD THIS: 'Your Great Journey', 'All the Time in Airports', 'These Golden Jewels'