Gravenhurst mainman Nick Talbot is a sad guy, but on the group’s fourth album, he keeps finding new and interesting ways to describe, if not ease, his own pain. “Hourglass” mulls the emotional significance of the specific places that trigger flashbacks to past relationships, while “Trust” imagines whether chasing down the ex of your ex for a heart-to-heart would be as soul-crushing as it sounds. The Bristol, England, quartet is growing musically as well, coloring its stark narratives with tweaked-out guitar sounds and piano (the My Bloody Valentine-ish “Hol-low Men”) and artful smears of noise (“Farewell, Farewell,” which wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Yo La Tengo’s Painful). Compared to 2005’s Fire In Distant Buildings, whose last two songs took up nearly 20 minutes of the album, The Western Lands offers more bang for your buck. There’s a snaking, vaguely krautrock-ish guitar figure on “She Dan-ces,” an Ennio Morricone-style Western motif propelling the instrumental title track and a melodic tension on closer “The Collector” that forgives its lack of full release. Love still bites, and it’s nice to know Talbot is there to set the damage to song. [www.warprecords.com]
—Jonathan Cohen
