Jesse Sykes - 'Like, Love, Lust and The Open Halls of The Soul' (Fargo) Released 12/02/07

The platter's pompous handle sounds like the title of the most pretentious art house flick ever. Venture past that wordy hurdle, which at least provides a decent description of the album's subject matter, and the Seattle-based outfit's third release proves capable of mending the wounds hordes of cutprice Gram Parsons clones and hard-going heralds of generic gloom have inflicted on alt. country's reputation.

Guitars crunch, tempos thud and stinging solos are dished out in family-sized servings as Jesse Sykes and her Sweet Hereafter sidekicks beef up their brand of Gothic Americana with healthy dollops of shitkicking rock 'n' roll. As is often the case in alt. country-ish circles, the influence of Neil Young hovers over the proceedings. Perhaps the grizzled Canadian is something of a guitar-slinging superhero, always prepared to gallop into rescue whenever a band's struggling for inspiration in Americanapolis. Although the sizzling slo-mo stomp of 'How Will We Know' and the swaying 'LLL's steaming six-string showdowns are so Crazy Horse-ian they might well be on the lam from the hallowed grooves of 'Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere', these 12 tracks are far too classy to plunge into pointless pastiche.

Plenty of the band's trademark slow-burning spookiness is on the menu, whilst 'Air Is Thin's bleary-eyed soul-rock stew simmers like a prime cut off 'Sticky Fingers', the loose 'Station Grey' dons the shining spurs of top-notch country-rock, and - keeping with the Stones connection - the epic sweep of the 'Open Halls of The Soul' shimmers like peak-era Jagger & Richards jamming with Gram Parsons amidst the sawdust and spittoons of an old-school saloon. In case it seems the Sweet Hereafter's clocks are permanently set in the 70's, the jubilant 'You Might Walk Away' and the hook-drenched drama of 'I Like The Sound' take a break from retroisms to swirl and shimmy like close relatives of the Howling Bells.

Should any further proof of originality and relevance be required, Jesse Sykes's unique voice puts forward a case-closing argument. At first, her spooked, half-whispered slur smacks of a gin-soaked boozehound attempting to rock the mic with a set of ill-fitting dentures, with a side order of the breathless fright of a deer caught in the headlights. Spend some time getting acquainted with it, though, and her one-of-a-kind pipes emerge as an expressive cross between the weightless purity of Emmylou Harris and the blues-drenched wail of Janis Joplin. On the likes of the haunting lullaby 'Spectral Beings' and the tender 'Aftermath', which swells into a majestically beautiful brass-enhanced coda, Sykes's performance conjures a captivating combination of soothing, ethereal calm and unsettling eeriness, with results that pack equal amounts of fragile ache and resilient force. Which is a pretty apt description of this excellent album as a whole.