KEY POINTS:
Bonnie "Prince" Billy: The Letting Go
Herald rating: * * * *
Sparklehorse: Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of the Mountain
Herald rating: * * *
M.Ward: Post-war
Herald rating: * * * *
I had thought these guys inhabited a similar orbit. After all, they're all oddballs from the great American musical wilderness who have a track record of albums of strangely fractured intimate music.
However, when I chucked them together on the iPod-iTunes thingamy, it appeared I was wrong.
Bonnie "Prince" Billy, who is sometimes known as Will Oldham among other monikers, is "alternative" according to the software.
Sparklehorse, which is the nom du singer-songwriter for Mark Linkous, is "rock" and M. Ward, singer and elegant guitarist out of Portland, Oregon, and heading this way for live dates in January is apparently "folk".
True, Oldham's last album had him playing with post-rockers Tortoise and making serious adjustments to Elton John and Bruce Springsteen classics.
Ok computer, but how then do you explain Mr Billy's conventional approach on The Letting Go - voice, the gentlest of guitars, bass and drums, lilting melodies, string arrangements, songs about love?
"Alternative" it isn't. And (not counting the free-form hidden track) it comes without the art-flake edge that has undermined many of Oldham's previous solo efforts.
This is just Oldham matching his songwriting skills - as heard on Johnny Cash's cover of his I See A Darkness - to musical settings and vocal performances which make his songs soar like they have never managed before, whether it's the likes of the slow-fused Cursed Sleep or the grand sweep of Strange Form of Life.
Recorded in Iceland and with Dawn McCarthy playing a kind of Emmylou Harris/Nicolette Larson to Oldham's Gram Parsons/ Neil Young throughout, it's an album that still evokes the American backwoods suggested by earlier albums, especially on the back porch blues likes of Cold and Wet.
Oldham retains his ominous obsessive lyrical edge - best heard on Big Friday and Lay and Love - but tempers that with the longing expressed by the likes of opener Love Comes to Me and the ballad I Called You Back.
A clear contender for singer-songwriter album of the year, alternative or otherwise.
It's been five years since Linkous delivered the last Sparklehorse album, the terrific It's a Wonderful Life which confirmed him alongside the Eels Mark "E" Everett as a sort of heir apparent to Tom Waits.
It's soon apparent that Dreamt for Light Years ... doesn't quite have the rustic charm of his earlier work but - possibly care of some production work by Danger Mouse - it sure sounds more hopeful, more lush and more Beatlesque.
Well, that's until the album's two fuzz-rock numbers - Ghost in the Sky and It's Not So Hard - kick in.
They might shatter the mood and have you ripping at the headphones but they're almost as infectious as the rest of the kinder, gentler songs which make Sparklehorse's fourth album a dreampop treat. Even if second track Getting It Wrong starts out sounding worryingly like Lionel Ritchie's Hello.
It's the fourth offering, too, for Matt Ward and he also sounds in a more upbeat frame of mind than on earlier occasions.
With his sepia-toned reverb-drenched approach of twangin' guitars and occasionally Orbisonesque singing - especially opener Poison Cup and Today's Understanding - you can sometimes wonder what war that title might be referring to? The Korean?
But sometimes he's coming on like a acoustic-framed Flaming Lips (To Go Home), offering his own Tom Waits-strength bone-rattling weirdness (on Right In the Head and Requiem) chucking in a burst of instrumental surf guitar on Neptune's Net (which nicely quotes from Sesame Street's Rubber Ducky).
There may well be some folk in there too, but don't let that put you off.
Bonnie "Prince" Billy: The Letting Go
Label: Spunk/ EMI
Verdict: Will Oldham records in Iceland but comes in from out of the cult
Sparklehorse: Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of the Mountain
Label: Capitol
Verdict: Mark Linkous gets in touch with his inner Beatle on long-awaited fourth album
M.Ward: Post-war
Label: Spunk/EMI
Verdict: Alleged "folk" artist lets fly with electric guitar and offbeat songs
