Record Rack

* * * GILLIAN WELCH “Time (The Revelator)� Acony

The first sounds on Welch’s haunting third album are jarring adjacent notes strummed on acoustic guitar. They set the tone for everything that follows--unsettling, disjointed thoughts and emotions that reinforce and extend the compositional skills she and partner David Rawlings laid out on her previous two efforts.

Even in moments of great beauty (the romantic country waltz “Dear Someone�) or comfort (the bluegrass and gospel-inflected “Red Clay Halo�), Welch and Rawlings deftly break the predictable flow with discordant notes or left-field progressions. By doing so, they amplify their lyrical perspective that nothing in life can be taken for granted.

She concludes with “I Dream a Highway,� a nearly 15-minute epic that’s both a meditation on emotional distance and a weary prayer for reconnection. It’s a track that seems constantly on the verge of rolling to a halt, but like the struggle it examines, it just keeps going and going before eventually fading out on a note of desolation.

Occasionally, Welch and Rawlings try too hard to create the sense of timelessness for which they’ve been lauded in the past, but more often they pull it off superbly.

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Albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor), two stars (fair), three stars (good) and four stars (excellent). The albums are already released unless otherwise noted.