And saving the best of this week's look at trad blokes-with-guitars is this album by young New Jersey singer-songwriter Pete Yorn.
Managing a mix of rustic pop-rock that sits somewhere between Sparklehorse and the alt-country of Ryan Adams, with occasional echoes ofthe Pixies and Lemonheads, Yorn's first outing is a scuffed, scrappy delight.
It helps that he's got an expressive, bruised voice to command attention and complement his lyrics, which may be about the old boy-girl stuff but still intrigue with ponderings of relationships going sour.
Music for the Morning After delivers equally fine lines in dreamy jangled melancholy (Just Another, Lose You), exultant wiry rock (Black) and the Foo Fighters-meets-Muttonbirds of For Nancy, and muscular country-ish twang (Murray, inspired by the Beach Boys' father, Murry Wilson, and which he apparently wrote in Auckland).
As all that takes hold, Yorn's 14 songs coalesce into something special.
Good enough in fact that by the time the hidden 15th track - possibly titled A Girl Like You - gives us one last slice of Yorn's heartache, a much-used but appropriate phrase comes to mind: "a classic debut".
