Crone of the Wildwood return with "A Short Life of Trouble", an album that feels like it was dredged up from the underbelly of American folk itself - a lamentation recorded not in a studio, but in a tunnel in Columbus, Ohio. That detail matters: this isn’t just music performed, but music haunted by stone, air, and echo, where every phrase seems carried off by unseen water trickling through cracks in the concrete.

The collective - anchored, as always, by the indefatigable Zack Kouns - continues its tradition of revolving-door personnel. Here, Kouns is joined by Garrett Maner (whose violin and euphonium sound like ghosts arguing in the half-light) and Drew Sherrick (whose 12-string and percussion lend both shimmer and thud to the proceedings). The instrumentation is spare yet thick with suggestion: a zither can become a spiderweb, a clarinet a half-broken train whistle, and the harmonium a funereal wheeze that would make even the bravest bones shiver.

The source material is a centuries-old folk lament, reimagined through extended improvisation until it feels both utterly new and older than the hills. “A Few More Days Apart” lingers like the echo of a church bell in an empty town, while “I’d Rather Be Dead in Some Lonesome Graveyard” doesn’t so much reinterpret its grim title as embody it - slow, skeletal, and oddly comforting in its honesty. The longest piece, “I’ll Give This World And Half of My Life”, drifts like a dirge turned mantra, spiraling toward catharsis before folding back into the tunnel’s silence.

What makes this release remarkable is how it balances reverence with irreverence. Crone of the Wildwood never treats folk tradition as a fossil, but neither do they dress it up for cheap modernity. Instead, they stretch it, worry it, let it bleed and breathe until it mutates into something unclassifiable: drone-folk séance, funereal improvisation, or maybe just the sound of three people daring to stare too long into the mouth of a song that never ends.

"A Short Life of Trouble" is folk stripped down to its bones, but those bones rattle with electricity. To listen is to be reminded that trouble - like the tunnel - echoes, repeats, and never fully disappears.