The one line that will turn up in all of The Low Anthem's UK press is that Steve Lamacq labelled them "this year's Fleet Foxes". Even if they seem unlikely candidates to make the same kind of high street impact, the track you'll most likely know them for so far, 'Charlie Darwin', which opens proceedings on this third album (but first to make a wider impact) refers back to somewhere in between Pecknold and co and Bon Iver. It's back porch acoustic Americana, laced with harmonies and Crosby Stills & Nash spirit, so spare you can almost feel the air in the room. Ben Knox Miller sings in a high, keeningly tender register about the ills of the modern man and his failing corporations ("Fighting for a system built to fail/Spooning water from their broken vessels, as far as I can see there is no land") and a dusty harmonica solo at the end. It feels timeless, like it could equally have been handed down from an Alan Lomax field recording or featured as this month's Mojo magazine rave. A trio from Rhode Island now signed to Nonesuch in America and Bella Union, after an earlier release through End Of The Road Records, in the UK.Slippery customer, expectation. You're probably wondering whether we really need another plaintive voiced, harmonically strong, intimately produced North American band after the year we've just had. But while Justin Vernon sounded like he was making music out of catharsis and many of the genre within a genre's fellow travellers are as much West Coast as backwoodsmen, The Low Anthem's strength is that at their most musically downbeat, down at heel even, superior there's a clear warmth, whether the lyrical content be world fearing, painfully personal or just spiritual at heart. The arrangements seem direct from Woody Guthrie's dustbowl imagery, pared down and antiquated.It'd be far too easy to compare and contrast these songs of emotional pull and bleak aura with other old time for new audiences artists, but there's as much Nickel Creek as Delta blues or Will Oldham in many of these songs. The yearning for lost love and for a change of scenery in 'To Ohio' sounds equally like the Felice Brothers and Simon & Garfunkel. 'Ticket Taker' is a closed miked song of possibly unrequited love against the fall of the world, reusing the waters rising metaphor from 'Charlie Darwin' as a backdrop for hoping the lyrical character Mary Anne might join him despite everything. '(Don't) Tremble' is a more direct love song wherein Miller comes across as a backwoods Guy Garvey, both in his careworn vocal and his finding new and interesting ways to reflect the deep devotion of love - "If your tree should bare no fruit/Do not turn and do not spill... If your hand should lose its grip/Do not tremble do not sweat, for where then would you get". And then there's the 'other' Low Anthem. The one that turns in a whisky sodden stomp on 'The Horizon Is A Beltway' and 'Home I'll Never Be', wherein Miller turns his larynx growlingly red raw and the band turn in a blues stomp that approaches modern bluegrass and Tom Waits somewhere between his barfly and junkyard incarnations. (In fact the latter is a cover of a song most famously recorded by Waits, written by Jack Kerouac.)Then, in the last third, it nearly throws it all away. 'Champion Angel' is virtually a bar-room boogie, the one time the band really allow themselves to let go, but by the same token it seems to come from a completely different album, meant to lead into the swirling pump organ and hope/fatalist images of 'Cage The Songbird' but ending up detracting from its slow burn. Additionally, the idea of ending with a differently played version of 'To Ohio' that isn't as good seems as though the band are saying they didn't get round to writing a big finish that tied in all the ideas, hopes and aspirations considered throughout the album. It's a shame it has to end like this.Oh My God Charlie Darwin is driven by the quest for better things, taking itself away from the big bad commerce of the modern world and finding solace in the little things - love, opportunity, community and a sense of belonging. Where the album peaks work their magic is in how they take influences often older than the acoustic folk community the band have ended up being placed alongside and recontextualise them so they sound fresh not by force of will, but in the enveloping warmth of sentiment and sound. 78%The Low Anthem on Myspace