Death, drugs and gambling are just a few of the topics up for discussion on the Be Good Tanyas' follow-up to the spiffing Blue Horse.

This time, the Vancouver-based female trio strike a mood of spooky sparseness, the songs squeezing maximum leverage from a minimum of carefully deployed voices and acoustic instrumentation.

Junkie Song, for instance, is just a couple of voices and acoustic guitar, until a trumpet drapes the landscape in gauzy bluesiness. Dogsong 2 is the bare bones of a waltz, nudged along by weary fiddle, careworn guitar and ghostly tinklings from an old piano.

Rowdy Blues isn't so much rowdy as decorous, but maybe it was a wild hoedown about 300 years ago. Cunningly, the Tanyas are never quite folk, bluegrass or gospel - but all that stuff is in there somewhere.