Artist:     Brother Dege

Album:     Farmer’s Almanac

Label:     Psyouthern Records

Release Date:     6.1.18

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A uniquely cinematic and psychedelic subversion of traditional, death-obsessed Delta blues, Farmer’s Almanac immerses itself in the dark eccentricities and rural secrecy of the Deep South, a place the mysterious Brother Dege knows like the back of his hand.

Nominated for a Grammy for his song “Too Old to Die Young,” selected by Quentin Tarantino himself for the “Django Unchained” soundtrack, Brother Dege has led a gypsy’s life, soaking up years of weird experiences while doing odd jobs, overcoming addictions and living on society’s margins. What comes of all that hard living is a sweeping Southern Gothic concept album – think Flannery O’Connor with a taste for supernatural slide guitar – that follows his Folk Songs of the American Longhair and other subsequent releases with something even more apocalyptic, haunting and epic.

Bookended by rich, lavish instrumentals “Partial to the Bitters” and “Partial to the Bitters, Part II,” Farmer’s Almanac is often lush and expansive, as the enveloping Americana of both “The Moon & The Scarecrow” and “Laredo” comes on like a flood. More rustic, with soft, but emphatic, insistent pounding, “The Shakedown” – sinister martial drumming heard in the distance, with a wave of mind-bending noise rising and subsiding – and “Bastard’s Blues” seem primal and earthy, while the urgency and drama of “The Ballad of Ingo Swann” broker a more elegant musical deal with the devil, Robert Johnson and Tom Waits.

Burning like a surreal bonfire of evocative lyrics and bottleneck guitars, stoked by artfully rendered, and often droning, acoustic instrumentation, Farmer’s Almanac is a broken piece of scuffed luggage bulging with troubled narratives of angels, drifters, ghosts and oddballs trapped in a hole of small-town desperation. The stories get under your skin. Intoxicating and unsettling, its sounds want to drown you.

• Peter Lindblad