Songs straight from the heart

Two years ago Vic Chesnutt's Silver Lake picked up five stars in these pages and ended up in our best-of-the year list. The wheelchair-bound singer-songwriter from Georgia has been championed by REM, Joe Henry, Cracker and Sparklehorse among many others, but name checks by famous friends seemingly can't take his dramatic, often lushly arranged and emotionally charged music to a wider audience.

That's a pity, because on Ghetto Bells (with a band including guitarist Bill Frisell, arranger/pianist Van Dyke Parks and the Jayhawks' drummer Don Heffington) he once more brings a blend of deliciously mysterious balladry, alt Americana, and his customary quota of disturbed melancholy and anger.

What Do You Mean? floats along with dreamlike Beatlesesque harmony vocals which could have come from Abbey Road, there's a Ziggy-like feel of brittle corrosion to Got To Me, and a damning swipe at George W. Bush on Little Caesar. To Be With You is a love song which aches with equal parts desperation and barely suppressed rage.

But it is in the delicately arranged ballads (notably the gentle love song Forthright) where he radiates his genius.

With Frisell's warm, Eno-ambient and chiming guitars - or abrasion where required - Ghetto Bells stands as another burning beacon of unique and sometimes disturbing songs in a career of powerful, shining lights.

Anglo-folk rocker Richard Thompson's Front Parlour Songs is a thoughtful collection of multi-tracked acoustic songs recorded in his upmarket studio/garage and should find favour here for mentioning an Air New Zealand hostess and Dunedin in the opener, a humorous story of failed lust and love.

With only percussionist Debra Dobkin helping out, Thompson has added electric bass, mandolin and accordion for a textured scrapbook which reveals his easily overlooked droll wit, but also his moral censoriousness (Should I Betray?) and slightly misanthropic nature (the yearning for no emotional attachments in A Solitary Life).

He plugs in for the brooding My Soul, My Soul, and draws on the English folk tradition for the central section of Row Boys Row and The Boys of Mutton Street.

Thompson's voice can be demanding but, ironically, when it is so sparely presented you can better hear the nuances of expression. Longtime followers can sign up with confidence.

Richmond Fontaine come with big advance notices: the indie Americana band from Portland broke big with their rowdy Post to Wire album two years ago, which drew favourable comparisons with the Replacements, but for their follow-up, The Fitzgerald, they have turned the volume way down.

Written by guitarist Willy Vlautin while living at the Fitzgerald Casino in Reno, it is a collection of (mostly) acoustic songs of windswept melancholy and the marginal figures who hang around the less glitzy areas of such desert towns, and is shot through with Waitsean stories and characters sketched in with specific, telling detail.

An album of late night whisky-shot and stale-cigarette moods, delivered over strummed guitar and piano, peopled by those broken by the burdens of life and love, and set in an emotionally empty landscape of cinematic dimensions. And songs such as Exit 194B, about a house of memories, are heartbreaking. Quietly terrific.

Stuart A. Staples is modest. On his solo debut after 15 years with the Tindersticks, the singer chooses to open with a dreamy instrumental. But that establishes the downbeat, considered mood on an album which is a model of restraint and consideration in his vocal delivery, and arrangements which are spacious, subtle and intimate. "Here comes the moment", he croons in Marseilles Sunshine, and that moment is one of delay and understatement, and on the spare Dark Days, of almost holy resonance.

Things hit a pace in the buffeting of Say Something Now - like Eno-period Roxy Music with squirrelling sax - and there is sofa-shaking bass added to the louche nightclub ambience of Friday Night.

With a few Stickmen in attendance, these home recordings are given a gentle sheen and emotional weight, and the result is discreetly impressive.

Alternatively there's We're All Gunna Die by the eccentric Danny Cohen, who was brought to his label by Tom Waits but comes with one chief disadvantage for a singer: he can't sing. But, like equally odd Daniel Johnston, he writes songs with suggestions of such melodic beauty (in Cohen's case occasionally reaching for Bacharach complexity) that you can't help but smile, even when his dark songs are about the Big Issues like funerals, hopelessness and caffeine.

With his wobbly vocals set against lovely arrangements the whole thing has an eerie, out-of-kilter feel. There are echoes here of Captain Beefheart's blues growl and Waits' clanking storytelling. Among The Cows is a funny and cynical swipe at 60s idealism, there's a snatch of Jagger's country drawl in the ballads, and a bit of wheezy Dylan in songs about death of all kinds which, oddly enough, don't ever sound depressing. Just nicely weird.

Vic Chesnutt: Ghetto Bells
(Herald rating: * * * * *)
American cult singer-songwriter delivers his 12th album with no signs of fatigue or drop in quality.
Label: New West/Elite

Richard Thompson: Front Parlour Ballads
(Herald rating: * * *)
Former Fairport Convention mainspring's first solo acoustic album in 24 years. He should do it more often
Label: Shock

Richmond Fontaine: The Fitzgerald
(Herald rating: * * * *)
Raucous rockers courageously take on the spirit of early Tom Waits, the late Gram Parsons and the no depression movement - and win on points
Label: Southbound

Stuart A. Staples: Lucky Dog Recordings
(Herald rating: * * * * *)
Founder-frontman of long-running Brit band The Tindersticks sits down for a solo acoustic session. Glorious.
Label: Shock

Danny Cohen: We're All Gunna Die
(Herald rating: * * *)
Real name possibly Errol Sprague, occupation eccentric musician, album about death of many kinds. Righteously strange.
Label: Anti/Shock