Mojave 3

EXCUSES FOR TRAVELLERS

(4AD)

Mojave 3 make you feel the way you would if you found out all your friends had deserted you and weren't coming back. And it's all your fault. Perhaps not since Nick Drake (the band's most obvious influence) or Sandy Denny or Jeff Buckley have artists made sorrow sound so exquisite and elegant -- so necessary to the human experience. Out of Tune (4AD), Mojave 3's semi-breakthrough second album, was a gorgeously despairing affair, luminous with the kind of poetic heartbreak and shuddering melancholy that folks like Belle & Sebastian value so much. Mojave 3's roots go back a decade, to when three of the band's five members (Neil Halstead, Rachel Goswell, Ian McCutcheon) made a handful of ravishing echo-steeped albums as the UK shoegazing outfit Slowdive.

On the incandescent Excuses for Travellers, the group continue to mine sadness to sublime effect. "My Life in Art" is a wistful meditation on dreaming and desperation. On "Trying To Reach You," acoustic and pedal steel guitar recast the melody from Neil Young's "Lotta Love," but the tale finds Halstead at the end, rather than the beginning, of a troubled relationship. And concealed beneath the gauzy grace of "In Love with a View" is a crestfallen lament for an unrequited love. There are a few breezier -- and more disposable -- moments here (the brass-driven "Any Day Will Be Fine"), but Mojave 3 remain at their best when they're miserable.

-- Jonathan Perry