The third album from Seattle’s The Cave Singers finds the three-piece maturing well enough, padding out their sound with inventive flourishes and roughing up their edges with jags and bristles. Emerging on Matador in 2007 with debut Invitation Songs, this was the mildest of supergroups, with Pete Quirk of Hint Hint and Marty Lund of Cobra High convening around Derek Fudesco, late of Pretty Girls Make Graves. They honed in on a dark, alt.country niche where their brooding blues could reach out to next to no one, but picked up vague critical impetus which gathered momentum with 2009’s Welcome Joy, where songs took some shape and – a step forward, this – tended not to hang around too long.

Such concision is sustained on No Witch, their first release for Jagjaguwar, which keeps tracks relatively snappy while suggesting the sort of depth expected with longer compositions. Throughout, there’s the wordless sensation of being at the heart of a spiritual crisis, botched robbery or apocalyptic incident – something gritty and real yet not entirely specific. Quirk’s drawled, nasal (yep, Dylanesque) vocal helps this along, offering one comprehensible phrase in every three – the sort of trick pulled by Caleb Followill to imply he’s singing about anything other than how great shagging is – but it’s also the nature of this wizened, rootsy music to appear to address significant issues when it might as well be a strum-along to a shopping list.

From supposition to reality then, the big change on No Witch is dose of rocking grimness for The Cave Singers’ sound. Where Welcome Joy was largely bucolic and lightly played, here the riff takes centre stage, and a classic Stonesy riff too. ‘Falls’ is stripped-back blues with Hammond organ thrown in for urgency, like a trad workout from Exile On Main St., while ‘Clever Creatures’ and ‘Haystacks’ hail guitars so low-slung even Keef might struggle to reach them. This rock’n’roll buzz is a boon to The Cave Singers, who use it as a base to bring in a gospel chorus on ‘Haystacks’, sitars on the trippy ‘Outer Realms’ and lovely flute punctuation on the swinging ‘Swim Club’. There’s no earthly reason to place all this in the 21st century, but it’s decent revivalism and if there’s a tendency to cliché – plenty of “devil talk”, lashings of harmonica – it’s all ballsy and apparently sincere.

If there are surprises, there are trembling strings on ‘Gifts And The Raft’ which are a ringer for the harmonium (obviously) on The Penguin Café Orchestra’s ‘Prelude For A Found Harmonium’, and glam guitars on ‘No Protection If We Bail’, queasily reminiscent of Shania Twain’s ‘Man I Feel Like A Woman’. But these are odd bookends for an album of otherwise fuzzy fretwork and campfire chants, that keeps pace and holds interest without ever quite working its magic.