Album: Dirty Three, Toward the Low Sun (Bella Union)

There's a familiar elemental tone to the Dirty Three's latest album – except this time the oceanic influence is replaced by snow and sky and rain.

It opens more ferociously than usual with the free-jazz bustle of Jim White's descriptive drums and dark clangour of Mick Turner's guitar furnishing an unsettling base for the gouging organ and Warren Ellis's stormy violin parts to describe the "Furnace Skies"; but "Sometimes I Forget You've Gone" offers a more reflective interplay of piano and guitar. In "Moon on the Land", the violin and guitar are joined by accordion, before Ellis's forlorn tone brings a plaintive drift to "Rain Song". Drifts of another kind mark "Ashen Snow", whose gracefully layered strings and piano settle like soft accumulations of snow: elemental, but not alienating.

DOWNLOAD THIS Sometimes I Forget You've Gone; Furnace Skies; Ashen Snow