Far Off Country Burning Shed***

This album is cleverly titled: the music here could easily be termed alt.country if it weren't for the genre-shifting presence of Irish singer Sandra O'Neill, a guesting Brian Eno and multi- instrumentalist Peter Chilvers (better known, perhaps, for co-creating, with Eno, the iPhone apps Bloom and Trope). Their collective take on, for example, country standard Banks of the Ohioand John Denver's Country Roads, offers a far more intuitive understanding of the lyrics than you would think; ditto their versions of Elbow's Not a Joband Gillian Welch's I Dream a Highway(clocking in at a wonderfully spooky 14 minutes). Eno adds his own singular ambience on Beyond the Fold, while a second original song, Another Town, benefits from the kind of sepulchral twang we haven't heard since Cowboy Junkies removed the bullets from their pistols. See letka.co.uk

Download tracks: Beyond the Fold, I Dream a Highway