The Civil Wars (Sensibility Recordings/Columbia)

In the end, your take on the Civil Wars will depend not so much on your musical tastes as on how you feel about consonants. Me, I like them: they aid intelligibility and add percussive snap to the sung or spoken word. Joy Williams begs to differ, however. Like Stevie Nicks, she’s never met a consonant she couldn’t swallow—and this makes her voice a melodious but infuriatingly incomprehensible coo.

Which is too bad, because there’s a lot to like about The Civil Wars. On the plus side, there’s the way that Williams and now-estranged songwriting partner John Paul White repurpose old Appalachian folksongs in the service of slick Nashville pop. “From This Valley”, for instance, is basically “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” with a thumping bass line and a dash of vocal acrobatics. And the sound of the record is impressive: producer Charlie Peacock finds just the right blend between acoustic and electric instruments, while his crew of Music City veterans, including steel-guitar greats Jerry Douglas and Dan Dugmore, clearly appreciate the relative freedom he affords them.

Ultimately, though, the record founders on Williams and White’s inconsistent songwriting, and on a few too many gimmicks: the tacky tango breakdown on “Oh Henry” and the contrived authenticity of the iPhone-recorded “D’Arline” being the worst offenders.

And then there’s that singing. Whether the Civil Wars will continue past this new release remains a mystery: its principals apparently quit working together once The Civil Wars was done, citing “irreconcilable differences of ambition”. Williams has said that the real reasons for the split are encoded in the new disc, and you can draw your own inferences from opening track “The One That Got Away”, which kicks off with the line “I never meant to get us in this deep.” On the other hand, maybe White just didn’t understand her—and if so, he has my sympathy.