Album: Vic Chestnutt & Widespread Panic

Co-balt, Evangeline

When Vic Chesnutt first hooked up with fellow Athens, Georgia residents Widespread Panic back in 1993, to form the collective Brute, few had heard of either. Now, Chesnutt is a songwriter of some renown, while Widespread Panic have gone on to become one of America's hottest gigging bands, attracting a massive cult following in the underground manner of the Grateful Dead and Phish. This reunion finds both parties at the top of their game; the band cranking out exultant, anthemic arrangements, which recall the likes of U2, REM, Nirvana and Crazy Horse, behind some of Chesnutt's most compelling songs.

His is a dark, cynical worldview, in which all the veils and excuses are ripped aside to leave the bare emotional truth – most bleakly in "Cobalt" itself, where a sexual liaison is ruthlessly anatomised in the manner of a wildlife programme: "They acted out of instinct/ They performed precisely as mathematics dictated." Equally desolate is "All Kinds": a brutal survey of outcasts, from the lonely junkie whose only friends are "dealers and dodos", to the internet-porn freak whose "sad obsession is a digital impression of a darling little girl". Not that Chesnutt is immune to his own unflinching gaze, as he chides someone for "starting rumours that we are lovers/ when the only thing that I've been sleeping with is the Cutty Sark". Which only makes his empathic treatment of blue-collar workers in songs such as "Adirondacks" and "Expiration Day" all the more moving: the latter being not so much about the dignity of labour as the defining nature of an occupation.