In a small town on the Polish-Czech border where the mobile signal wanders between countries’ operators and only three inhabitants stick it out through the winter, animals are wreaking a terrible revenge. The bodies of murdered men, united in their penchant for hunting, have turned up in the forest, violently dead and rotting. Deer prints surround one corpse, beetles swarm another’s face and torso. Foxes escaped from an illegal fur farm need little motive to exact summary justice on their former jailor.

Of all the great country superstars of his era, Willie Nelson is truly the last man standing (as was made clear by the title of his last album… Last Man Standing). In his mid-80s his output has, if anything, become more prolific. However, if his 1970s outlaw persona could peek into the future and see what 2018 Willie was up to, he might be surprised.

A sight every music fan should see and hear once is The Proclaimers playing Scotland. Around 18 years ago I saw them play a giant marquee at the T In The Park Festival. It was like a rally, a roaring wall of joyful fanaticism (on which note, their autumn 2018 tour there sold out 30,000 tickets in 20 minutes!). If it was a rally, though, it was a righteous, tending-to-socialism one for The Proclaimers have a strand of activism in their blood. On their latest album, this is writ large.

This woozy, seductive slice of gothic Americana is the Canadian quartet’s first album in six years, a swampy follow-up to the icy, winter-inspired sounds of their last offering, The Wilderness. 

The heartland of America burns a special candle for two genres in particular: country music and heavy metal. What’s curious, then, is that there’s not been more cross-breeding between the styles. On a cartoon level, this can be attributed to one being God’s music and the other, Satan’s, but you’d have thought that would only encourage determined, disenfranchised teenagers in Lexington, Kentucky, or wherever.

Gota Fría, or “cold drop”, is a Spanish weather phenomenon associated with violent rainstorms, when high pressure has caused a pocket of cold air to dissociate itself from the warmer clouds. Meteorologists, please excuse my basic and probably erroneous interpretation; the point here is that any person who’s experienced mental ill-health will likely relate to the idea of a sudden dip in temperature, a torrential downpour, and the accompanying isolation.

All those pranks, set-ups, fake letters and disguises, they just keep coming thick and fast in Verdi’s Falstaff. The score has irresistible energy and momentum.

“Past My Door” weaves together a series of leitmotifs. Beginning as a downbeat, mid-tempo shuffle, it then shifts into a staccato passage after which the tempo picks up before a more pacey section. Next, the character established at the song’s introduction returns. Over four-minutes 20 seconds, the different approaches are supported by oblique lyrics which include the memorable phrase “too late, cries the melting snowman". At its core, the melancholy “Past My Door” seems to be about missing chances and being left behind.

Willie Nelson turned 85 at the end of April, a few days after releasing his latest album and a rare set of self-penned new songs, Last Man Standing. “I don’t want to be the last man standing,” he sings slyly on the shuffling, restless opener, “Oh wait a minute, maybe I do…” Last man standing? In several key contexts, that’s exactly what he is.

Two minutes into The Lookout, a couple of related parallels bubble up when the David Crosby of If I Could Only Remember my Name and Gene Clark at his most sparse spring to mind. It’s not that the album’s opening cut “Margaret Sands” sounds like either but that the creative outlook is similar: a country-ish singer-songwriter setting their composition in a baroque musical frame.

The rest of The Lookout is similarly conscious of how the form of delivery can shape a song. Yet such suggestions of lineage – an awareness of the classic – soon vanish. Ultimately and satisfyingly, Laura Veirs’s 10th solo album is about its 12 songs.

She has said it’s a concept album about the fragility of precious things. And despite the presence of guest vocalists Jim James (My Morning Jacket) and Sufjan Stevens as well as instrumental contributors Karl Blau, Tucker Martine and more, it is her album. “When it Grows Darkest” employs a psychedelic drone and “The Canyon” is jazzy. “Seven Falls” is close to straight country and features the memorable lines “How can a child of the sun be so cold… so cold… like a caveman they found on the frozen flats.” But because of the way the songs flow, The Lookout begs to be heard as a whole. Overall, the mood is reflective, with Veirs’s quartz-like voice the central unifying factor.

This, her first solo album in five years, follows her collaboration with kd lang and Neko Case. As such, The Lookout is a reclamation and, fittingly, its concerns are personal: ageing, dealing with a disordered America, parenthood, the balances struck in life. Continuity with her own professional past comes through her still being signed to Bella Union, the label she was on before the case/lang/veirs album. Whether The Lookout will achieve the same level of commercial success as that trio is impossible to call, but an album as assured as this deserves to.

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Overleaf: watch Laura Veirs perform The Lookout's "Seven Falls"