It was hard to understand how Calexico got themselves in such a pickle on their last album. Released in 2006, Garden Ruin confirmed that this was an especially rubbish time for the core members Joey Burns and John Convertino to stop sounding like themselves. Having had all their character burnished to oblivion by J. D. Foster, the album (and the ensuing lacklustre live shows) effectively cleared the path for a new generation of Americana practitioners to muscle in on the action.

In 2008, Iron & Wine, Fleet Foxes and Richmond Fontaine are all playing venues that more commonly grace the schedules of proper rock stars. That’s hardly a bad thing, but Carried to Dust — it’s a joy to report — is a reminder that even the bands who sit in the same record collections as the Arizona group’s back catalogue can’t quite scratch the same itch. In the mind of the frontman, Burns, it’s a concept album — or at least an album that takes off from a single conceptual starting block: a striking Los Angeles scriptwriter who spontaneously drives out of town and waits for serendipity to show him anything new.

Presumably then, Writer’s Minor Holiday was the song that opened the creative floodgates. Ironically, this static mid-set intermission is the only lull in an album purged of complacency, dense with exquisite performances: the bittersweet mariachi lilt of yore reasserts itself on House of Valparaiso and the instrumental spaghetti-western flourishes of El Gatillo (Trigger Revisited). Possibly because they started as a purely instrumental concern, Calexico’s ability to serve the song yields a stellar turn from their trumpeter Jacob Valenzuela and female Spanish superstar Amparo Sánchez — a world-weary tango from protagonists bemoaning the realisation that they have left it too late to keep the person for whom they changed.

Inspired by the eponymous Chilean poet and singer tortured at the hands of the Pinochet Government, merely the title of Victor Jara’s Hands sets off all your Sting alarms. But where Sting addressed the Chilean dictator in the second person (“Hey, Mr Pinochet,” indeed), Burns sketches his song out all the more effectively in the allegorical lingua franca — birds, wire fences — of Jara and hundreds of other protest singers who tried to keep going in a dangerous climate.

Burns’s eye for detail is no less effective on Man Made Lake. It’s hard not to think of the annihilation of New Orleans as he depicts a submerged landscape of marooned cell-phone trees, resistant to human life. Here and elsewhere, the word that would spring to mind is “consolidation”, were it not that such a term is far too prosaic for the emotions stirred by these songs. Nonetheless, Calexico are once again playing to their strengths — detailing a sonic sweep so wide that you can see the storm clouds well in advance of the foreboding chords that bring them. And yet, far from dissipating the thrill, knowing what’s coming merely compounds it.

(City Slang, TMS, £11.99, call 0845 6026328)

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of 2008
• Hitler and the Downfall mash-ups
• Britney Spears: The Circus