Since the Cowboy Junkies and Mazzy Star have been spotted hanging out at the recycling center, it's up to England's Broken Dog to carry the torch for glacially paced psych/folk. Vocalist Martine Roberts makes you believe every exhalation might be her last, and Clive Painter adds just enough guitar to the canvas. Is this music or is it an oil painting? Either way, this is art in the most literal sense.

Many bands loosely gathered under the new acoustic banner seem to be gravitating towards silence. Broken Dog are one of the most complex and interesting of that ilk. Predictably, they are useless live, but Sleeve With Hearts is a beauteous, finely woven (if faded) tapestry. The opening song Tracks sets the tone. An entropic drum-beat (any slower and the world would stop turning) is dusted with gently dissonant trumpet and guitar played so reticently you can hear Clive Painter deliberately missing the strings. Ghosting through this mix Martine Roberts' breathy tones remind you of an anglicised Julee Cruise (David Lynch's chanteuse fatale).Variations on these themes constantly replenish the quiet pleasures of the piece (hypnotic banjo on Drink Was The Height Of The Day, ethereal Theremin on They Were Real). On Got No Wings, Roberts is 'Worried about heaven and hell and which would be worse'. She should sleep easy.

For several years now they've lurked in the shadows, eking out a hushed, incandescent, mournful folk. Like spirits of the forest, theirs was a slight, deliciously fragile magic; their previous two albums scurrying from lo-fi boughs, so skittish and otherworldly you feared they'd melt under focus.
Mercifully brief period sans label brings us to 'Sleeve With Hearts', Broken Dog's third, and finest, album. And while the songs still feel hazy, as if their melodies were drawn from some waking dream, the duo have rarely sounded so well defined. No longer do the songs sound as if they are having to traverse some prohibitive crisis of confidence to reach their audience, although many, 'Stranger' in particular, recall Nick Drake lost in some immaculately opiated glide.
The instrumentation this time around stretches wider, from piercing strokes of brass on 'Tracks', to the lush orchestration of the sublime 'Third In Space'. The song writing, too, is noticeably more accessible, more 'developed', though these things are always relative - the best of this album sounding like Belly's more obtuse meanderings, further obscured.
The magic of Broken Dog, however, withstands these new developments; Martine Roberts' chillingly pure vocal still sounds like leaves floating on a river on an eerily still summer's afternoon. Immerse yourself.