There’s a sense of both journey and homecoming on Alela Diane’s eponymous third album. Half eponymous in fact, as her band – which includes husband Tom Bevitori and father Tom Menig, both on guitar – now form a tangible part of the Alela Diane set up. Christened Wild Divine, the prominence of her newly-baptised road band in itself reflects a departure from her previous two albums. Her once solitary approach to song writing has become a more collaborative effort, with both Bevitori and Menig given writing credits. Her deliberately anachronistic sound has evolved into something broader and more polished, with the 5-strong band replacing her often skeletal aural accompaniments – which until now have mostly been nothing more than an acoustic guitar or violin.

The sense of journey is evident in songs drafted on the road, on an epic year-long tour following her 2009 release, To Be Still. Her frustration with the vacuity of the tour bus and sterile motorways is marked on ‘Heartless Highway’ with the plea: “I got to get back home”. A tired call even more resonant with an artist like Alela Diane, whose writing is so much inspired by her natural landscape – the ethereal morning skies and copper hues of California fields, to which both To Be Still and 2007’s The Pirates Gospel pay tribute.

Other songs were crafted and honed in her new home in Portland, as she settled into married life with her newly-betrothed. The couple married shortly after returning from tour and started writing together. Yet, there are no surprises here, Alela Diane & Wild Divine still runs consistently on theme with her previous efforts – the literary sense of narrative, dream-like fables about gypsy women, and pastoral tales invoking her native Nevada. The husband-wife collaboration on tracks such as ‘Long Way Down’ – about a love growing cold and ‘The Wind’ – with its haunting reprise of “death is a hard act to follow,” invokes Richard and Linda Thompson, cementing her alignment more closely with 70s psych-folkers Pentangle and Fairport Convention, than her freak-folk contemporaries Davendra Banhart and Joanna Newsome (an old school friend), with whom she has so often been grouped with.

Working for the first time with REM producer Scott Litt, who came out of a seven year hiatus to record this album, has given her traditional folk sound a glossier, slicker pop finish which is evident from the first moment, with a synth intro on opening track ‘To Begin’. While the added instrumentation should bolster, not distract from her smoky, yet relentlessly powerful voice, at times it is a little tentative. The band rightfully centres around her remarkable instrument – powerful, drenched in the history of ages, passed down from her singer mother, but the trepidation is unnecessary, as her vocals could more than stand up against Wild Divine as a band in their own right. But still, this is a mesmerising listen, weaving tales of love, hope, death and homecoming that will leave you with a lump in your throat and an itch for the open road.