Natalie Merchant: The House Carpenter's Daughter

By GRAHAM REID

(Herald rating: * * * *)

Merchant's timing is coincidental but could hardly be better. With the screening of the excellent BBC doco series on country music Lost Highway fresh in the memory - and the sounds of scraped fiddles and mandolins still resonating - this collection of traditional and contemporary folk by the former frontwoman for 10,000 Maniacs draws on similar roots and sources.

But this collection is also eclectic, so here the Horseflies' neo-traditional Sally Ann (written a little over a decade ago) sits alongside the Carter Family's Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow, the 30s union anthem Which Side Are You On?, Fairport Convention's Crazy Man Michael and older sources as diverse as a Protestant hymnal and a Southern Civil War skipping song, here turned into a slice of robust blues.

The unifying feature - other than Merchant's sympathetic, powerfully quavering and keenly understood vocal interpretations - is the spare instrumentation of banjo, guitar, fiddle, upright bass and simple drums. And themes of deprivation and being dispossessed.

Her voice sometimes contains a wounded quality (Which Side Are You On?, the previously unheard death ballad Weeping Pilgrim, which she has arranged from a scrap of lyrics), but elsewhere she delivers a pulsing adaptation of the traditional murder ballad Diver Boy, with gristle-guitars and unsettling, dramatic sonics.

The moving Owensboro is an account of life at the bottom of the heap in milltowns of Kentucky in the late 19th century.

If O Brother Where Art Thou? or the first episode of Lost Highway caught you, then Merchant has extended the universal truths of those songs backwards and forwards, while adding her distinctive voice to the Anglo-American tradition.

Merchant has taken a long journey from being in a folk-pop band championed by REM's Michael Stipe to these backwoods and rustic songs, but if this was her destination she sounds entirely comfortable on having arrived.

Label: Myth America/Elite