Deceptive things, Gillian Welch albums. You spend the first few spins wondering how it could possibly have taken her and musical partner David Rawlings such an indecently long time (a whopping 8 years have passed since their previous release, 2003′s Soul Journey) to produce something this elemental and plain.

Then the truth slaps you around the chops. It could well – in fact, it must – take aeons to come up with a single melody that sounds as positively timeless as any of those that grace the ten cuts here, never mind a whole album’s worth of them. Other acts take their sweet time to create something previously unheard. For Welch and Rawlings, the time-consuming trick’s to reshuffle a strictly limited selection of tricks in order to come up with material that’s worthy of equal billing with the traditional folk/country/blues songbook that remains the pair’s principal inspiration, a feat The Harrow & The Harvest pulls off with impressive ease.

Fuelled by the same air of spooky mystery and borderline supernatural depths of the blues that fires the engines of finest traditional folk tunes, Welch’s fifth album treks on the dark side of the road. Full of deep wells, open graves, bones glinting at the bottom of rivers and, during an especially memorable moment during the mesmerising ‘Silver Dagger’, the song’s clear, bright melody hiding oceans of heartbreak, protagonists announcing they’re ‘through with bibles and food’, it’s beguilingly tricky to figure out which era the troubled wanderers who populate these songs are travelling through. The music is equally shot through with anti-ageing agents. Whereas its predecessor dabbled in electric instrumentation, The Harrow & The Harvest would fit right in at a time long before electricity was available, the only ornamentations around those trademark close harmonies being Welch’s sparse strumming (and occasionally banjo) and Rawlings’ spidery acoustic lead guitar.

Not that this is some joylessly scholarly retro trip: The Harrow & The Harvest manages to both respect and revere its influences and subtly update the traditions it’s built on. At times, the album appears to toy with folk/country cliches with a knowing wink. For example, ‘Hard Times’ is essentially a song about a struggling farmer loving his mule and the beast loving him right back. But Welch and Rawlings handle their sparse ingredients with such masterful skill that what could’ve easily unravelled into hokey parody emerges as a gem just as monumental as the traditional lament it shares its title with. Striking lines such as “I can’t say your name without a crow flying by” (on the heartbroken The Way It Will Be), meanwhile, prove Welch’s songwriting doesn’t rely on oft-visited conventions.

It’s not totally perfect. Rawlings’ nonstop soloing threatens to gallop out of control on ‘The Way that It Goes’, an otherwise excellent uptempo stomp – and the album’s one outright reference to modern times. There’s the odd moment when the album’s prevailing starkness threatens to become unnecessarily oppressive. On the whole, though, The Harrow & The Harvest‘s more than enough to keep the alt. country racket going until, well, the next Gillian Welch record.