LAMBCHOP, pictured, always have a sense of place, a stillness to assuage the broken hearts in Kurt Wagner's whimsical vignettes.

Wagner originally split time between his day job as a sander and his nocturnal pursuits leading his forever mutating Nashville collective.

One form of work used to be smoother than the other, but then the quirky Americana and indie rock made way for dignified country soul on Nixon and Is A Woman, and 2004's Aw C'Mon was all-too torpid with its ambient string and piano pieces.

Lambchop's eighth album in 12 years is another hushed record written on Wagner's porch and best heard in a quiet corner of the day, but its more personal soul searching - hence the title of Damaged - draws you in anew, as he frames his confession-box anxieties in the most delicate chamber strings and brass, steel guitar and electronica. Less idiosyncratic maybe, but more subtly magnetic, and it all ends in the cathartic squall of The Decline Of Country And Western Civilisation, where grace just this once makes way for a growl.

Cerys Matthews is more prone to such swings of mood within a song, switching from Welsh coquette to Janis Joplin screech on the oxygenated pop of Oxygen and Ruby on her second solo album.

Despite settling into marriage and motherhood in a Nashville shack - yes, there's the link between the two albums reviewed here! - she cuts a restless soul on this erratic follow-up to 2003's Cockahoop, her wonderfully homespun country revival after leaving behind her damaged Catatonia days in Cardiff for a Tennessee skyline.

Where Cockahoop caressed the heart with its tender bruised ballads and dusty country folk, Never Say Goodbye says goodbye to all that, and flounders between indie and pop, New York and Nashville, Morning Sunshine and The Endless Rain (one a radiant shard of Monkees happinees, the other a drizzling ballad).

In going from roots music to rootless, ironically she finishes back in Wales, singing the prettiest song of all, Elen, in her native tongue with co-writer Gruff from the Super Furry Animals.

  • Cerys Matthews plays The Band Room, Low Mill, Farndale, on September 23, 7.30pm. Box office: 01751 432900