The Trinity Session took desolation and made it both erotic and strangely solacing.

Unfortunately, The Caution Horses is a lesser version of the same. Again, most of the songs are about feeling cut off from one's dreams, performed in the same ascetic fashion. Worse, a certain self-consciousness has found its way into bandleader Michael Timmins's songwriting. The album's opening track, "Sun Comes Up, It's Tuesday Morning," is largely a litany of details about everyday disquiet, such as you might find in the stories of Bobbie Ann Mason or Ann Beattie, while the song that follows, "'Cause Cheap Is How I Feel," borrows its sense of speech from the hard-boiled fiction of William Kennedy or John Fante. It's nice that the Junkies have been reading, but sometimes nothing becomes a song's intended emotions better than simple language.

Still, when the Junkies hit the right blend of mood, music and text, the result can be transfixing. In particular, "Where Are You Tonight?" – about a woman who visits barrooms, meeting men to help her forget one desertion she can't afford to remember – is a doleful honky-tonk gem. Even more affecting is the band's cover of Canadian singer Mary Margaret O'Hara's "You Will Be Loved Again" – as spellbindingly mournful as anything the Cowboy Junkies have ever recorded. "She tells lies," Timmins sings. "But you'll take her back again/And is it enough/To die when you're so broken?" Moments later, she adds, "And you'll be loved again." Maybe O'Hara meant that line as reassurance, but when Timmins sings it in a tremulous voice, it seems less a promise than a curse.

Few bands can put across dark truths like that – epiphanies of futility rendered with a lovely languor – as alluringly as the Cowboy Junkies. The trouble is, dark truths can only be heard so many times before their effect dulls. Maybe next time the Junkies will pick up the beat and try railing against the darkness. With talents as smart and empathetic as theirs, that could be heartening music to hear. (RS 577)

MIKAL GILMORE