Alynda Lee clearly identifies with an inner gypsy. Deciding she wanted to become a musician, she fled her home in the Bronx and jumped across freight trains until she got to New Orleans, or so the story goes.
Her inner nomad, that unhinged wild-child of a spirit, ribbons through this, her band's third album, the first on British Americana and country label Loose Music, but this time it's burdened by a terrible loss.
Though it still has its feet firmly planted in the dusty grit of New Orleans, the record sounds as if it is roaming the back streets of bygone bohemia and windswept American plains before scuttling through dirty cities, decidedly lost and alone.
Lee sings of seeing the ghost of a lover in the pagan foot-stamping track Is That You?, cries over a "broken down old heartbeat'' in Daniella and accepts that parting is inevitable over the mournful tears of violins in Junebugwaltz.
Despite being accompanied by accordions, strings and friendly percussion she appears as a hollow, slumped-over shell of herself, and her mood crumples further as the album travels from the melodic, punchy piano of the opener towards the woven guitar patterns of the grief-stricken final track Young Blood Blues.
