Eve Adams spins alluring tales on the woozily beautiful American Dust

Which is precisely what features on the cover of Eve Adams’s fourth album, but with a twist: the Californian songwriter is presented as a domineering presence, a mountain-sized giant towering between the spartan clapboard house and the train speeding by in the distance.

The contents of American Dust rearrange the furniture in Americana’s living room with similarly vivid imagination. There’s not exactly a shortage of songsters seeking to poke into the foreboding and at times grotty underbelly of the American dream, as embodied in the hackneyed ideas of California as a promised land of plenty and Hollywood with its illustrious past as the world’s foremost dream generator.

These are songs that combine the usual fodder of first-person orientated songwriters (loss, longing, loving, leaving – for evidence, see the wistful closer “Death Valley Forever”) with unsettling glimpses into an alternative or altered reality that defies easy categorisations with regards to time and place. Sparsely decorated with understated strings, percussion and occasional wails of harmonica, American Dust is rooted in the desert terrains of the US Southwest, but it’s impossible to tell whether the misleadingly jaunty (and seriously infectious), hollered refrains of the (possible) eco-parable “Amen” concern an unspecified past, with recent arrivals to the LA region struggling to come to terms with the city’s tinderbox weather conditions, or a total environmental ruin where "the sun sucked up the life from all the plants, leaving us tender skeletons" that awaits in the future.

Whatever the case, it’s a startlingly resonant tune, with a crisp bounce and barn dance sway. That said, the less eagerly outgoing material also impresses. The hypnotically unsettling “Strangers” appears to connect the uncertain pull that two people can feel towards one other even if they don’t particularly want to with the potentially bruising bonding rituals of nocturnal beasts, while “Ask Me” frames its haunting questions ("tell me why you left that way") with an absolutely indelible melody that glides by like a cloud on an otherwise bright blue sky – or a train gliding through the fields at night. Even this pales next to “Ricochet”, which takes the timeworn set-pieces of a classic American (or Nick Cave-ian) murder ballad and gives them a robust, dust-clearing shake, with the song’s initial woozy, bourbon-soaked waltz gradually blooming into a positively celestial coda that glimmers and sparkles like fireworks going off.

Even more so than on Metal Bird (Adams’s excellent debut for Todmorden’s reliably excellent Basin Rock label), American Dust finds Adams pack real grit, alluring depth and fully convincing drama into by turns (sometimes simultaneously) edge-of-the-seat tense and irresistibly beautiful songs that feel thoroughly lived-in and, for want of a more appropriate word, real, even when Adams stretches her considerably agile songwriting imagination as far as it will bend.