Despite its many charms and achievements, 1987-1989 is the single worst album in the world to listen to when you're in a horrible mood. A collection of covers by singer Suzanne Langille and her guitarist husband Loren MazzaCane Connors, the album finds the deep, dark noir-ish side of the American folk song and buries it as deep as it can possibly go. Most songs here-- including the opener, a cover of Chuck Berry's "Wee Wee Hours"-- crawl along at a snail's pace, completely incapable of working up a head of steam. Through it all, Langille and Connors play the greatest hits of the Americana catalog: death, despair, pain, abandonment. While certainly a fine achievement in every respect, the whole affair's creepy enough to keep you from listening to it with the lights out.

1987-1989 is culled from recordings of the titular period, when Connors had just returned to the guitar after a self-imposed multi-year hiatus. Apparently, the two met while The Cane was living in some sort of weather-blasted squat, which explains a great deal about the nature of this pairing.

Any longtime fan of either participating artist will have a pretty good idea of what's going on here from the jump. Langille's dangerously silky pipes moan and keen while Connors plies the mournful, bluesy sound that's made him a late-date improv hero on two continents. The two make an excellent team for this kind of material: the guitar frequently mimics or mirrors the tone of the vocals, heightening the oppressive, doomy mood. Langille's solo work and Connors' instrumental efforts are both enough to make you want to jump off a building; together, they're like the house band at the release party for The Necronomicon.

Still, the taut interplay between voice and instrument here is astonishing. Left to her own devices, Langille sometimes veers a bit close to a coffeeshop folk sound, while Connors can disappear under waves of poorly thought-out abstraction. But when they collaborate, the singing anchors the guitar, and the guitar weirds up the vocals enough to make it all pretty intriguing.

To say nothing of the tunes selected for performance here. Not only does the duo turn St Chuck's peppy "Wee Wee Hours" into a slow, frightful trudge, but they also manage to make "Kumbaya" a positively unsettling experience. In both cases, stripping away the veneer of cheeriness that popular culture has laid over each tune allows the two participants to reduce the songs down to their basic components. Like Low without faith in any higher power, the arrangements' creeping tension breaks each song down to a mournful, almost wordless melody, and the chilly wail of electric guitar. When the pair close with a live version of "Amazing Grace," the tune never makes it past the emotional tone of "I once was lost." Even when Connors drifts out of a relatively spirited blast of electric guitar at the end of the track, it remains entirely unclear if the two were ever found at all.

Despite the doom-and-gloom atmosphere surrounding 1987-1989, the album remains fascinating and fulfilling for the deep and intuitive interplay between player and singer, as well as for the positively apocalyptic depression the music invokes. Even without the familiar trappings of either artist's solo work, the album never fails to produce a mood of encroaching despair and longing. The only problem is that the album is often too effective: the artistic vision here is so all-encompassing that you might never want to hear it again.

-Sam Eccleston