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SunDirtWater is the recent album by Australian band The Waifs. This album finds the band in stunning songwriting, musical and vocal form, and they are joined by some impressive guest musicians. On this album they manage to fuse their Australian sound with some of the best of American roots music. I would not have thought this would be possible... without listening to this album... again and again. This is one of the finest albums in my collection.

The album opens with Pony. This is a well-paced country-ish groove with shared vocals - Donna Simpson takes the lead by just a bit. The fact that this song features a piano and has Josh Cunningham playing electric, rather than acoustic, guitar seems to signal that this is going to be quite a different album for the The Waifs.

This is followed by the album's amazing title track. Written and sung by Vikki Thorn - her only song-writing contribution for the album - this is a groovy, spirited, almost jazzy track that features some excellent lead guitar by Josh and some funky percussion. Josh has described this song as The Waifs' finest recorded moment. It is certainly very good... but, while I don't want to disagree, picking the finest song on this album is a very difficult task.

Vermillion is a dark and haunting ballad written and sung by Donna Simpson. When I saw The Waifs perform this at Tilleys in April this year the room was stunningly quiet when the song ended until Donna said "Yeah, I made all that up." It certainly is compelling fiction...

How Many Miles is a lively country-rock composition by Josh, with Vikki on lead vocals. This song reminds me of a very good Lucinda Williams track. It's deliciously laden with slide guitar, plus guitar and harmonica solos, and it just drives along. This is followed by Without You, with the same writing/vocal combination. This is a classic Josh album track - it's easy to imagine him singing it - but, as usual, Vikki turns in a fine performance.

Donna's Sad Sailor Song features a dirty guitar groove, Hammond B3 by Reese Wynans and soulful lead vocal performance. This track has a nice dark feel to it and is rockier than much of The Waifs previous material. The combination of strong arrangement and restrained vocals reminds me somehow of Cowboy Junkies.... and then, somehow, also is reminiscent of Sheryl Crow.

The Josh/Vikki (writing/vocals) combination is evident again on Get Me Some. For some reason, this feel-good song somehow reminds me a lot of the classic Everybody's Talkin'. This song features some lovely electric piano and the vocal performance is fantastic. Eternity finally finds Josh on lead vocals. Josh always seems to provide a welcome change. He doesn't pack the vocal punch of Donna and Vicki, but that's a feature. Things get relaxed in a whole different way when Josh takes over lead vocals... and the band would lose an important feature without him singing a song or 2 on each album.

Sweetest Dream finds Donna in awesome vocal form, singing a gospel-style song. This track features beautiful Hammond B3, once again by Reese Wynans, and just enough lead guitar from Josh, plus a slathering of gospel backing vocals. Vikki returns with Goodbye. This is quiet a rocky song, with song great slide guitar playing, and is actually a lot like a very good Sheryl Crow song. Yet more rocky is Stay, featuring some uncharacteristic, but interesting, vocals from Vikki... and seems to provide a subtle hints about the album's closing track. This song reminds me of someone else... but I just can't pick it right now.

The second last song on the album is Donna Simpson's Love Let Me Down. This song is an epic ballad that gets quite heavy, and has a strong Cowboy Junkies feel to it - given the Junkies uniqueness I'm surprised to be making the comparison more than once. However, the similarity comes from the arrangement, featuring an acoustic guitar, some beautiful dirty lead guitar and harmonica. I love this song.

The album closes with Josh playing ukelele and Vikki crooning on the retro Feeling Sentimental. It's a delightful touch, with splashes of clarinet filling out the song. An interesting song to finish on - almost like the closing song from the soundtrack of a 1940s movie.

This album strongly features Josh Cunningham's songwriting. He's written a lot of The Waifs songs in the past, but here he's clearly the main writer, with 9 of the 13 tracks. The quality and variation is amazing. Although the 3 tracks written by Donna Simpson are stunning and Vikki Thorn rightly earns the title track, it is Josh's songwriting that forms the backbone of this album and allows it to be great.

The Waif's previous studio effort Up All Night contained a number of modern day Aussie classics and seemed like it would be hard for the band to follow. However, SunDirtWater seems to be an effortless follow-up, containing great music performed by one of the world's best bands, with perfectly executed overdubs by excellent session musicians. This is the least acoustic and is certainly the darkest of The Waifs albums.

This is my favourite album of 2007 - I can't stop listening to it. Some albums seem to fit perfectly with some point you're at in your life and SunDirtWater does that for me might now. This one feels like it is challenging Janis Joplin's Pearl as my "desert island" album... and that's a pretty big call...