Johnny Cash: American V: A Hundred Highways

This album commands respect. It is, after all, the last "new" material we'll hear from Cash in the final of the Rick Rubin-produced series, which since 1994 had reinstated Cash as the rebel Godfather of American music.

It is also an album that would seem to reflect the final period of Cash's life after the death of his wife June Carter Cash and before his own in late 2003.

So yes, if the previous American IV: The Man Comes Around was the sound of a man about to meet his maker - especially on his devastating version of Nine Inch Nails' Hurt - then this risks sounding even more like Cash: Live at the Pearly Gates.

But oddly, while it is certainly a weighty affair, especially when you hear Cash's grave and halting voice struggling with the phrasing of Gordon Lightfoot's If You Could Read My Mind, it's not as morbid or heavy-hearted as its predecessor.

It doesn't come with any songs that either pronounce his own death as ominously as the likes of Hurt did, or, indeed, any that seem the product of Rubin's contemporary lateral thinking - no Rusty Cage, Mercy Seat or I Won't Back Down.

No, other than Cash's originals, the most contemporary material here is Bruce Springsteen's Further On Up The Road, on which Cash sings, tongue-in-cheek, about wearing "a dead man's suit".

And if there's something familiar about the stomping traditional gospel number God's Gonna Cut You Down, it's because it had a previous revival as a sample on the Moby track Run On, though Cash's version takes it back to its earthy roots and beyond.

Many songs here are Old Testament country delivered by Cash with creaky ease - it opens with Larry Gatlin's Help Me and closes poignantly on the Jimmie Rodgers' I'm Free from the Chain Gang Now.

And there's trains carrying caskets on Cash's Like the 309 - the last song he wrote - and his take on Hank Williams' On the Evening Train.

Somewhere between the hoedown spirit Cash injects into 309, and the reflective romantic tone of the Lightfoot number and the Rod McKuen-written Frank Sinatra-recorded Love's Been Good To Me, this album achieves the expected poignancy but without feeling the need to strive hard for it.

A Hundred Highways comes down to 12 tracks on which the late great Cash is captured - as Rubin had done brilliantly before - in stark fashion on songs which carve the legend of the Man in Black a little deeper. But it's also a final chapter of quiet resolve and lasting resonance.

Label: American/ Lost Highway