Whitehorse
Album: Leave No Bridge Unburned
Label: Six Shooter
Tracks: 11
Website: http://www.whitehorsemusic.ca

In effect, Whitehorse is just Canadian husband-and-wife duo Melissa McClelland and Luke Doucet, but the sound they make on this (their second full-length album) - and indeed, by all accounts, also on stage - is dead tough and extremely full. It's characterised by forceful, smouldering, swaggering twangy guitars, thudding beats, bold country-rock gestures, great vocal harmonies, and self-penned songs of extraordinary power and sensitivity.

Well ok, technically I should own up that for the album sessions they've engaged some additional drummers, a couple of keyboardists and producer Gus Van Go as bassist, so the sound's even fuller than we've a right to expect, but the strength of the material is staggering too. From the dark gothic southern-noir of album opener Baby What's Wrong through to the creepy, dusty spaghetti-western whiplash borderland of Evangelina, the urban psycho-choogle of Oh Dolores and the curiously quasi-mariachi territory of You Get Older to the pensive clattering twelve-bar The One I Hurt, via the barbed tenderness of Dear Irony and Fake Your Death (And I'll Fake Mine), this is a continuously arresting parade of fine songwriting couched in a distinctive sonic presence that rumbles through your consciousness like a long-travelling juggernaut across the panoramic landscape of the mind and makes a comparable impact on your psyche.

Essential and indelible I'd say. Yeah, Whitehorse is both an abundantly exciting, white-heat combination of talents and resources and an intense powerhouse of sound: ignore it at your peril.

David Kidman