Greg Brown: Milk of the Moon

By GRAHAM REID

(Herald rating: * * * * )

Itinerant, Iowa-born singer-songwriter Brown has pulled together a prolific and creditable career, largely out of the spotlight. I tuned in for his superb The Poet Game in the mid-90s, and by that time he'd already racked up a dozen albums, one of them William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience set to music.

Since then his dark brown baritone, moody and often melancholic songs and memorably direct lyrics have come out of my stereo with surprising regularity, more frequently than better-known names like Tony Joe White in fact, whose swamp sound Brown occasionally explores.

He's been twice nominated for Grammys (which I suspect hasn't changed his sales a jot), has appeared frequently on Garrison Keillor's radio programme A Prairie Home Companion, is a published author who namechecks poets like Kenneth Rexroth in his lyrics, and this latest album - which opens with the minimal and grim Lull It By - is hardly going to set off a rush to the cash registers.

It's a stripped-back affair with songs of lost and gained love. Brown keeps his lyrics refined (Smell of Coffee is like a Gary Snyder, American-Zen poem) and the music is pared back to essences of melody and rhythm. Less is very much more with Brown.

But it's not all low-range moods. A Little Excited is a chipper love song over twanging rockabilly guitars, Let Me Be Your Gigolo is snaky swamp-funk, he invites favourable comparisons with a romantic Dylan on the lovely title track, and The Moon is Nearly Full, with its distorted vocal and slewing slide guitar, is just plain spooky.

Ashamed of Our Love is the deliberately unpolished gem: an aching question posed over distant accordion, slide guitar and an ethereal vocal harmony from Karen Savoca.

Brown is an acquired taste perhaps - after the release of the forthcoming tribute album featuring Lucinda Williams, Ani DiFranco, Gillian Welch and other women, more accolades may come to him - but once heard he is seldom forgotten. For some this might not be the most accessible starting point, but it's pretty convincing as the winter dusk falls.

Label: Red House/Elite