Frank Black has always enjoyed swimming against the musical mainstream, and new album Dog In The Sand finds the former head Pixie in defiantly offbeat mood.

Completed in just 10 days on a two-track machine, it takes his no-frills approach to recording to new heights - resulting in a refreshingly direct sound.

Black has expanded his band from a four to a six-piece for this all-but live recording, while former Pixies cohort Joey Santiago adds his skewed guitar lines to two of the 12 songs.

Recording followed a tour of the US hinterlands, with Exile On Main Street and Blonde On Blonde playing on the van between gigs, which helps explain the album's traditional country rock flavour.

Its budget may be restricted, but Dog In The Sand is an album of wide open musical spaces. Slivers of pedal steel guitar cut across a flowing backdrop of acoustic guitars and piano, and there are moments when you can almost see the tumbleweed rolling past.

Not that they sound like any old bar band. Black's vivid lyrics and intense delivery add an unsettling twist to the traditional format, and most songs feel like they blew in from a David Lynch movie rather than the Great Plains.

The sweeping melodrama of The Swimmer and St Francis Dam Disaster provide the album's most emotionally-charged moments, while Robert Onion and Blast Off carry the kind of brooding, sinister undertone which used to make the Pixies so compelling.

As someone who follows his own path, Black has always been an easy musician to respect, but his output has sometimes been uneven. Dog In The Sand finds him back on form, although his obsessive quest for old-fashioned authenticity isn't finished yet.

"I forsee a time when we will record to wax cylinder, or perhaps release only on sheet music," he says. "Further and further back in time."