This week's roots releases reviewed

SLAID CLEAVES

Everything You Love Will Be Taken Away, Music Road Records ****

This album could easily carry a public information note: master craftsman at work on grim detail. Slaid Cleaves is a wonderful storyteller, but on this collection – his first set of new songs since 2004's excellent Wishbones– a darkness permeates his eye for telling detail. The album title, from the opening song Cry, gives the game away. And yet this is no dirge. Austin-based Cleaves weaves his tales in deceptively simple language, telling the kinds of stories that sleeve-note writer Stephen King would be proud of, such as the chilling anti-death-penalty song Twistin'. His melodies are warm and comforting, perfect frames for his word pictures, such as the anti-war Green Mountains and Meor the city detail of Hard To Believe, and the mainly acoustic, understated playing allows his slightly melancholic voice to shine. www.slaidcleaves.com JOE BREEN

Download tracks: Cry, Hard to Believe, Temporary

NANCI GRIFFITH

The Loving Kind, Rounder Records ***

Hard to believe, but this is Nanci Griffith's 19th album. She shows no sign of tiring, however, even as she approaches her 56th birthday. The Loving Kindis a measured blend of her liberal leanings and ruminations on love and life wth a number of outstanding songs such as Not Innocent Enough(about Philip Workman, who was executed in 2007 having being sentenced to death in 1981 for a murder he always denied), Up Against the Rain(inspired by the late Townes Van Zandt) and the title track about Richard and Mildred Loving, whose US Supreme Court victory settled the issue on multiracial marriage. Age has thankfully roughened the girlish tone in her voice, and while there are no surprises here I would love to hear her sing more tunes like the weary honkytonk lament Tequila After Midnight, which seems to suit her voice so well. www.nancigriffith.com JOE BREEN

Download tracks: Tequila After Midnight, The Loving Kind

CHRIS WOOD

Albion An Anthology, RUF Records ****

"Music is so much easier to make when it's your own." So reckons Chris Wood, a quintessentially English folk giant, and who could argue with him after listening to this breathtaking double CD anthology? It's a look back not so much in anger as in surprise at the rich seam he has mined ever deeper with each of his 11 albums. Wood makes no apologies for the complex evolution of his own musical personality, and he expects much of the listener: to cock an ear to the silence between the notes as much as the notes themselves. Alongside the gargantuan Mad Johnand the baroquely arranged John Ball, not to mention Wood's seminal Albion, there lurks the transcendent The Land, borrowed from Karen Tweed and Timo Alakotila's timeless CD, May Monday. Unravel it, layer by layer. A balm for any music lover's soul. www.englishacousticcollective.org.uk SIOBHÁN LONG

Download tracks: The History Man, Albion