If Drinking Songs was the wound, Howling Songs is what the wound looks like a year later, not healed, just quieter. The guitar figures stretch longer, the voice pulls further back, and what's left is a kind of desolation that doesn't ask for your sympathy. "The Kursk" spends twelve minutes on a single motif that never resolves, because some things don't. Time here doesn't pass; it accumulates. #Matt Elliot