To say David Thomas Broughton’s music is woodsy is not to associate him with hemp kaftans. It is to say that in this dense acoustic environment of looped guitar and thrumming double bass you never know what you’ll stumble over.

‘River Lay’ describes this forest’s watery boundary; you can “waste your life on the banks” pondering the incommunicability of love, and the nature of words, which “can never bridge the widening divide”. The song is muddy-coloured with a plodding rhythm like a tin man’s steps. It has been emerged in several incarnations in Broughton’s infamously odd performances, where he knocks over and readjusts a microphone a few dozen times, or coaxes feedback into an unbearable squeal, or rips a newspaper to shreds. He adopts a vacant, erratic demeanour that likens him to that Tin Woodman, or perhaps the Creature. And even in Outbreeding, this most albumy of his albums, there is a feeling that these songs are still not final, that the singer is still digging for some unknowable truth.

There is a structure to these tracks unmatched by 2007’s It’s In There Somewhere and earlier recordings, with the soft bossanova beat that clicks beneath ‘Apologies’ and the full-band folk bluster of ‘Nature’. But the sense of incompleteness pervades, not in the music but in the subject matter. This forest is full of the living dead – rotting flesh, unresolved issues. Broughton sings in a full-throated moan peppered with glottal stops, Hegarty meets Yorkshire meets zombification. Our narrator is a ‘Perfect Louse’, he will “bleed the goodness from your body”; in ‘Staying True’ he complains of how his own body is “so crap at staying true to my will”. It is a neat bit of serendipity that this self-deprecation peaks during the spooky, ramshackle ‘Electricity’, with its haunted-house synths, sampled muttering and xylophones. After all the blundering apologies this song marks a narrative turning point, with Broughton gulping out that, “in the main all that I can glean that it is the reason that this world is fucked / underneath our discrepancies is a glint of hope and I call this thing love”.

And he breaks, directly after, into a cheery, clockwork re-imagining of ‘Ain’t Got No Sole’. We’re back at the river but today Broughton has “no fear o’ drownin”. Impossibly twee handclaps and accordions come clattering in, asserting all kinds of optimism in the dark landscape. This, coupled with Motownish closer ‘Joke’, feel like incredibly smart moves, boasting the musical and emotional range that Broughton’s back-catalogue somewhat belies. And thank goodness, because it was beginning to feel like a self-discovery retreat up in here. We can happily leave that camp-fire shit to Bon Iver; because Broughton will always be ripping away from the beaten path, frothing at the mouth, scrabbling for enlightenment in a new stretch of earth.