With her ordinary housedress and faraway gaze, Gillian Welch looked as though she'd just stepped out of a Dorothea Lange Farm Security Administration photo on the cover of her 1996 debut album, Revival. She sounded like it, too. Welch resurrected the simple, singular arch of prewar country and folk music by quoting the Carter Family, embracing Woody Guthrie and paying her respects to the earliest strains of bluegrass. She stays put in the past on her second LP, Hell Among the Yearlings. But rather than celebrate the joys of early country and Guthrie-inspired folk, Welch examines their darker sides and finds demons and death wherever she turns.

Lyrically, Hell Among the Yearlings resounds with despair. Nearly all the songs that Welch and her partner, David Rawlings, wrote for it are painful pictures of rural America. The album opens with the grisly "Caleb Meyer," in which the female protagonist kills her would-be rapist. "Miner's Refrain" is a chilly story of an accident underground, while "One Morning" is a blood-stained tune about murder. In the album's most darkly beautiful song, "My Morphine," the drug provides frail and temporary respite before death comes knocking here, too.

Throughout, Welch sings with a world-weary resignation. Hell Among the Yearlings' bare-bones instrumentation – a guitar here, a banjo there – settles softly on each track's surface, enabling her detached, narcotic voice to hover over the melodies. File next to Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska. (RS 794)

ROBERT SANTELLI