Album: Nicolai Dunger, ***

Tranquil Isolation, Virgin

The Swedish singer-songwriter Nicolai Dunger's Soul Rush was one of the best-kept secrets of 2001, a warmly romantic exercise in rootsy Americana saved from corrosive irony by Dunger's distance from his obvious spiritual heartland. Since then he's found a musical soulmate in Will Oldham, who invited Dunger over to record with him and his brother Paul at their backwoods studio in Kentucky. The sparing and melancholy settings that they accord Dunger's songs are a far cry from the more sophisticated arrangements of Soul Rush. These songs rarely develop further than an acoustic guitar or two, a discreetly brushed snare, a few lonely piano chords, and maybe a smear of violin or wheeze of harmonica – a whiskery, antique sound in which the hickory-smoked drawl of Dunger's voice sounds right at home. Sometimes, Oldham echoes Dunger's lines, or adds quirky harmonies that fit together with the ramshackle appeal of Dylan and Johnny Cash; and the whole album is suffused with the enervated back-porch manner that Oldham brings to all his own work. Most of the songs are about love, with "Wonders" urging a lover to exult in her ardour, because "There will come a day when that feeling counts/ Keep that wonder in sight"; but Dunger also writes about his old nanny's grace and wisdom, about the way Tim Hardin sings the word "beautifully", about interrupting his parents' love-making, and about the art of songwriting itself, most elegantly in "Hey Mama": "Tell me what is wrong with my song/ When I hear it, it sounds tender/ But every time I sing it, it becomes hard". Another understated gem.