BEING ONE of the few grunge-free acts to hail from Seattle and hold down a deal with Sub Pop, The Walkabouts have oft been regarded as something of an anomaly, when in fact, their y’allternative yodel has always subtly shadowed the patricidal yowlings of Kurt ’n’ Eddie.

The band’s 1994 album was called Setting The Woods On Fire, taking the title of Hank Williams’ jovial hoedown and twisting it into a take on the north-eastern gothic shared by minds as disparate as David Lynch, Tarnation and novelist Gail Anderson Dargatz.

But, to get to the point, the key word on Trail Of Stars is clarity. Every syllable that seeps from the throat of vocalist Carla Torgerson does so with the stark relief of visible breath on a frosty morning, framed against immaculately balanced backdrops of prim rhythms, deft guitar/keyboard textures and swooping string sections.

The opening suite of ‘Desert Skies’, ‘Straight To The Stars’ and ‘Gold’ could’ve come straight from one of Lanois’ OP8-ted sci-fi country visions, or the halcyon days when Michael Brook’s infinite guitar still tickled Mary Margaret O’Hara’s somersaulting tonsils. This is a record made of high skies, wide plains and abundances of space, pierced by the occasional epiphanal couplet like,“Between hell and hello/There will be no lettin’ go” (‘On The Day’). Trip-honky-tonk, anyone?

That said, Trail Of Stars can sometimes sound a little top-heavy, threatening to capsize under its own gravitas-ational pull, but nit-picks aside, the record’s concluding sequence, particularly ‘Drown’, finds The Walkabouts having well-nigh perfected their craft, following their own peripheral trail. Of stars, naturally.