*** Pinetop Seven

RIGGING THE TOPLIGHTS

(Truckstop/ Atavistic)

As this album opens and the pining strains of a harmonica drift and creak against a rusty swing somewhere, you can almost see Henry Fonda's flinty gaze in Sergio Leone's Western noir classic Once upon a Time in the West. That's the kind of dusky cinematic music this Chicago trio make and the unhurried, exacting pace they set: high, lonesome, and deliberate. It's sweeping and reclusive, like a lone figure stalking an expanse of barren prairie. Rigging the Toplights is an impressive cross-hatching of musical impulses: the spaghetti-Western atmospheres of Ennio Morricone, the dust-choked Americana of Son Volt, the arty worldbeat of David Byrne. In fact, on songs like "Rust in His Step" and "The Fear of Being Found," singer Darren Richard comes across like a peculiar hybrid of Byrne and Son Volt's Jay Farrar while a procession of instruments -- clarinet, violin, accordion -- gives a haunted-exotica coloring to the landscape. Kind of like a lonely midnight breeze cooling the sun-scorched desert.

-- Jonathan Perry