He calls himself "Robert," but the Willard Grant Conspiracy singer-lyricist is obviously Nick Cave"s long-lost twin brother. Imagine him stolen Stateside and reared in rural Massachusetts, host to most of Cave"s eloquent sensualism but less of his suicidal romanticism and starchy posing, composer of odes to acrophobia and destroying a house element by element. Tensile strumming on guitars, banjos, and basses underpins each soliloquy, with gradual encroachment from distortion noises like spirits materializing in a haunted house as the sun sets. An album to play indoors in the middle of a cold, rainy day or outside at the dawn of a bright burning one. --Andrew Hamlin