For their 1990 album The Caution Horses, Cowboy Junkies recorded a superb cover version of Powderfinger, bringing out all the inherent pathos and haunting sadness of Neil Young's amazing song.
Over twenty years later the band are still at the height of their game and echoes of these feelings underpin the ten tracks of The Wilderness.
Songwriter Michael Timmins lists all the themes this superlative album touches upon: "fragility, emptiness, loneliness, beauty, chance, loss and desperation".
No-one is better qualified to capture the essence of these moods and states of being better than his sister, Margo. Like fine wine, her voice has matured to perfection.
It concludes the Nomad Series on a real high; the fulfilment of an ambitious project the band set themselves to record four albums in 18 months.
As with the previous three volumes, the album is graced with the elegant artwork of Enrique Martinez Celeya an American artist of Cuban extraction.
Musically, the raw electric blues of Volume 3 (Sing In My Meadows) gives way here to the forlorn, slow burning ,mainly acoustic, material that has always been the band's forte.
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On Fairytale, details of children's fables merge with the blood and ruins of a life while lamenting "the effort is takes to keep on dreaming".
On Let Him In, "loneliness becomes an expectation" while the album's centrepiece - The Confession Of Georgia E - documents a "slow descent into darkness/madness"
In this company the venom (and grumpy humour) expressed in the album closer - Fuck I Hate The Cold - feels like a celebration.
With a weariness bordering on despair, these songs of experience are peopled by men of sorrow, by forgotten angels and spirits in limbo; songs about feeling lost, yet longing to be found.
'Masterpiece' is not too strong a word.
Cowboy Junkies Online
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