Hey Mr Ferryman continues former American Music Club frontman Mark Eitzel's winning solo streak

Then again, Hey Mr Ferryman isn't exactly business as usual. Produced by ex-Suede guitarist Bernard Butler, who also plays all the guitars and keyboards, the album opens with "The Last Ten Years" (originally written for American Music Club), which gallops with a brisk pep and radio-friendly sheen you wouldn't necessarily associate with a songwriter whose most acclaimed works in the late 80s and early 90s were shot through with at least as much misery, gloom and unmitigated despair as the output of similarly melancholy fellow San Franciscoans Red House Painters.

The more richly layered, smoother but not soullessly slick sound doesn't signal that Eitzel has shied away from heavy subject matters this time around. "The Last Ten Years", for example, appears to address the time-bending impact of spending your life in the permanently blasted twilight of bars, checking over your shoulder every now and again in case the mythical boatman of river Styx has arrived to row your weary, booze-marinated body to its final destination. Elsewhere, the deceptively breezy - make that chilling - "Nothing and Everything" and the raw, slow-burning "Just Because" (a brilliant example of squeezing the maximum drama from the simplest of ingredients, with Butler's slithering, overlapping guitar riffs suggesting a storm that's slowly but inevitably, unstoppably brewing) address abusive relationships. However, Hey Mr. Ferryman comes across brighter and more approachable than its predecessors, making it easier to appreciate the wry humour lurking beneath the dark surface of Eitzel's for the most part superior songs.

As impressive and - crucially - sympathetic to the material as the initially almost distractingly rich production is, the real star of the show is Eitzel himself. There's real depth and fully realised ambition to complex narratives such as the casino death odyssey "An Angel's Wing Touched The Penny Slots", sung from the perspective of an elderly gambler who keeps returning to the casino scene of his passing. Eitzel proves himself one of the few veteran singers who can credibly boast of being in a notably better voice than in the era of their supposed triumphs: the vocals to the genuinely moving "An Answer", for example, are extraordinarily expressive, affective and effortlessly soaring.

Even more consistently inspired than Eitzel's previous two, excellent solo albums (2009's Klamath and Don't Be A Stranger from 2012), Hey Mr Ferryman demands that Eitzel is at last granted at least as much attention and acclaim as his fellow songwriting Mark, former Red House Painters-leader Kozelek.