Matt Bauer, "Blacklight Horses"

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Back-porch banjo meets sweeping strings on Matt Bauer’s “Blacklight Horses,” where the indie-folk balladeer’s gothic Americana takes on a chamber-music tinge. Bauer’s latest album, The Jessamine County Book of the Living, is full of shadowy settings where unsettling things are always lurking just out of sight. That quiet tension is cast in duet mode here, with the troubadour’s dust-blown tonsils tumbling into Jolie Holland’s sultry swoop. There’s a creepy campfire-story feel to the tune, as the natural world quivers before the encroachment of an industrialized apocalypse: coyotes are crowded out by construction in a place where morning and night have both ceased to be, and even the storyteller is nothing more than a “warm ghost of light.” -- Jim Allen

"Blacklight Horses" Matt Bauer