Already ranked No. 1 Independent Album of the Year by the New York Times following its US release in 2002, Louisiana-born singer/songwriter Mary Gauthier’s third album reaches these shores with advance fanfare. Happily, it doesn’t disappoint.

As the title hints, these are dark songs about grim topics: heroin addiction (‘Merry Go Round’), homelessness (‘Christmas In Paradise’), relationship breakups (too many to list). ‘Sugar Cane’, co-written with Catie Curtis, looks back to Gauthier’s childhood in Thibodaux (which ended abruptly when she stole the family car to run away from home at age 15). It’s not a pretty vision: “Dirty air,” she sings, “dirty laundry, dirty money, dirty rain/A dirty dark at daybreak burning the sugar cane.”

Gauthier (pronounced ‘Go-Shay’, as the CD booklet informs us) has a natural Southern twang and a laid-back, conversational singing style that keep the unrelenting gloom of the lyrics from crossing over the line into self-parody. And there’s even a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel: on the final track, ‘The Sun Fades The Color of Everything’, with its beautiful backing of finger-picked guitar plus a cello-like droning harmonium, it sounds as though the lovers who lie “Awaiting the return/Of the passion that has left us” might actually have reason to hope, since “Every time we think it’s gone / It comes back again”.