For their tenth studio album and first of new music since 2008’s Pilgrim Road, the Willard Grant Conspiracy have made a haunting, remarkable record which grips you like the living dead. The songs are spare and sketch-like, like a few brushstrokes of a Japanese watercolourist capturing the alien landscape of the dying wild west. It’s compelling and insistent, never easy listening, and a great record.

First the facts. On this record the WGC consist of Robert Fisher, the single constant of the group over the 10 records, and David Michael Curry who brings a guttural and deep viola sound that characterises the whole enterprise. It’s clearly inspired by the landscape of the Californian desert, where Fisher now resides, but in particular Brodie, a ghostly ex-mining town in the Sierras. Fisher was invited there to contribute poems about the place, and the poems became the songs and the musical pieces that make up Ghost Republic.

The album opens with an instrumental,the gentle ‘Above the Treetops’ – guitar and spare piano mixing with soaring viola to suggest a wide, quiet vista, an empty place of intrigue. It’s simple but paints a vivid picture and mood. ‘Perry Wallis’ follows – a tale of the death of an old cowboy, who breathed his last breath round the campfire. His boots too worn, not good for any other man, so flowers are planted in them. The song is a meditation of this image. Gentle and gutsy at the same time, a life summed up in worn boots.

‘Parsons Gate Reunion’ is another gentle instrumental, but also marks the point where the record become unsettling and weird. Reunion of whom? The dead, and perhaps the living. Juan Rulfo in his book Pedro Paramo takes a similar nightmare journey through abandoned desert towns until you realise that half the characters are dead. It’s like that here.

‘Rattle and Hiss’ introduces real menace in the shape of the snake, while ‘The Only Child’ is instantly chilling – with a melody reminiscent of ‘Venus in Furs’, plucked viola and words that tell of “Mary Mary not so contrary/ …Mary’s mind is full of spirits/ all of them better left unnamed”. A scary menacing miniature that leads into the title track. As the viola gets scratchier and more atonal, the words paint an impressionistic picture of possession by another person. The guitar quietly howls with feedback and leads into ‘Take no Place’, an obsessive repetition of the line “Take no place of another”.

Things finally tip over the edge with ‘Incident at Lake Mono’, with howling feedback , fitful piano and hallucinatory vocals talking of ‘regulated contraband’. ‘Good Morning Wadlow’ is calm in comparison, but the greetings invoked have menace about them, while ‘The Early Hour’ is a scary, fretful instrumental with huge chopping feedback in the centre. ‘Oh we wait’ is a simple repeated melody, with chanted words “Oh we wait and the tears will come”. Final track ‘New Year’s Eve’ is an instrumental of feedback and eerie electronic sounds that seems to pick up of the menacing spirits that have been throughout the whole record.

You end the album wrung out and wired, knowing you’ve been on a strange journey and need to get to grips with normality. Still, you’ll want to go back again and see what you didn’t see the first time.