There’s precious little ‘alt’ about alt.country mainstays The Handsome Family since, like Jolie Holland and Gillian Welch, the husband and wife team of Brett and Rennie Sparks take the classic elements of country and weave them into timeless songs. Sure, they might have recorded Last Days Of Wonder on a computer in their Albuquerque garage studio, but many of the songs could be equally well served laid live onto tape in the `50s.

Most of the time Brett’s booming baritone gives voice to Rennie’s lyrics, but she takes a wavering lead vocal on the classically folk “Hunter Green” and locks in close harmony with her husband on the honky-tonk “Bowling Alley Bar”. The Family’s trademark natural lyrical imagery remains on their seventh album as roaring seas, burning suns, storms and clear skies provide the backgrounds for Rennie’s characters and a veritable menagerie of beasts, from birds to bears.

It’s not all wide-open vistas though: “Telsa’s Hotel Room” is a gorgeous tribute to the last days of the legendary scientist and inventor, while “Flapping Your Broken Wings” is a beautiful vignette of a late night dance on a golf-course green, and the growling “All The Time In Airports” contains the bitter lines “Flipping through the pages/Of books by millionaires/Who found that Jesus Christ could guide them/Into tripling their sales”.

However, the masterpiece is the closing track: the subject of “Your Great Journey” hasn’t yet realised that they’ve passed on, but are given clues in the form of automatic sinks not registering their hands, buses not stopping to pick them up and stray dogs gathering in their yard. It’s a beautiful, melancholy and uplifting conclusion to a beautiful, melancholy and uplifting album.