Excuses For Travellers

Just when you thought the golden age of 4AD was long gone, they give us the third album from Mojave 3 - and a little gem it is too.

Neil Halstead is a wonderful songwriter, but then anyone who heard the magnificent 'Some Kind Of Angel', from their second LP, Out Of Tune, knew that already. His compositions are full of gentle torture, whimsy and unrequited love. It's impossible to imagine Halstead getting angry, though, or raging against even the meanest of ex-lovers - instead he's the one who writes so eloquently as his heart falls apart. He's the guy perpetually stranded "at the station/ with a plan and a pocket of poems/ Heroically tragic/ Bearded and blind with obsession" ('In Love With A View').

'My Life In Art', weighing in at over seven minutes, is a beautiful and very visual examination of the downside of the American dream, delivered in a deliberate, unfussed manner.

Sometimes the uniform mood of slow-dawning depression and perpetual angst gets a bit much, as though the quintet are wallowing contentedly in their own melancholia. But then the music lifts itself out of the mire with a countryish twang, and a wink of its eye, dragging Halstead's black sense of humour behind it. Take the masterly 'Prayer For The Paranoid' where Halstead opines, with trademark fragility, "This town don't need drunkards or singers of bad poetry/ They need dancing and drugs and laughter, and we just don't have them".

If you're looking for bright and breezy, steer clear. Similarly, if you're searching for an emotionally charged, adrenaline pumping affair, Excuses For Travellers isn't your bag. But if it's well-crafted and beautifully performed paeans to loves lost, and life lived, you're after, look no further.