Imagine, if you will, an old black and white Western film set in John Ford’s treasured Monument Valley, directed by Sergio Leone, starring the cast of The Maltese Falcon. Now imagine the film has a pop/rock soundtrack instead of the usual Ennio Morricone music. This Twilight Zone spin on the old Westerns, combining them with Bogart’s cynical but honest gumshoe, Mary Astor’s femme fatale, and Sydney Greenstreet’s villainous “Fat Man”, gets its soundtrack courtesy of the Rues Brothers, an Americana duo from England.

The lightly picked guitar and the sound of ricocheting gunshots that open “Slow Draw” may grab the listener’s attention, but it’s the rich Roy Orbison-meets-David Byrne vocals of Henry Stansall that provides the deep hook of the music’s appeal. For Ten Paces, their third album, the brothers dive deep into the atmosphere of the odd combination of Western and film noir. The result is a song cycle that has a musical theme, and lyrical allusions, to another time and place. But just because it’s odd doesn’t mean it isn’t good, and Ten Paces is a very good collection of songs.

There is no plot or real concept to the record. This isn’t Tommy or Quadrophenia. It’s a hushed, mostly acoustic, somewhat downbeat affair with a cohesive sound that is not like anything else on the radio today. The Western feel to the music grounds the album in American country and folk but the songs themselves fit comfortably in neither genre. The album is classified as “Singer/Songwriter” in Apple Music, but there’s a little too much rock involved for that to be completely true. It’s impossible to imagine James Taylor singing “Hi-Yo”, a song about the search for gold that evokes the blood, sweat, and tears of the prospectors living in the hope that prosperity is right around the corner.

The imagery of gold appears again in “Silver to Gold” a love song that uses the titular phrase as a metaphor for a blooming relationship. These lyrical nods to the Western, often in conventional songs about love and loss, abound. A noose and hanging appears in the mid-tempo shuffle “The Fear”. Gunfight metaphors provide the lyrical hooks to the superb opener “Slow Draw”, “Bullet Blues” and “The Good Surely Die”.

“Is this a desert dream/Or a story in the West” Stansall sings on “Don’t Know What’s Come Over You”, a song of broken love with a pounding beat and a brief, out-of-place but still effective, synthesizer solo. Native American drums and the image of imprisonment highlight “Free As The Birds”. Only the closing track, “Long Road” is completely devoid of these nods and winks and is grounded in the present with its lyrics about turning on the radio and starting up the engine. But even here, the music keeps the connection with the rest of the songs alive with its subtle touches of pedal steel and acoustic guitars from Rupert Stansall.

Ten Paces is a return to form for the Ruen Brothers, an odd step in the opposite direction from Ultramodern, their previous album that tried to sound like its title with drum machines, processed vocals, and generally less-than-inspired songwriting. It’s a strong successor to their debut album All My Shades Of Blue, even if it’s lacking that album’s rockier tracks. This album deserves wider recognition than it has received, but when your music sits in another time and place obscurity is to be expected, if still lamented.

Grade: A