Knife in the Water is the title of Roman Polanski's first feature film. It is also, quite literally, an indicator of the subject matter of many of the band's songs: violence and marine activity. In fact, all but three of Cut the Cord's twelve songs incorporate scenes involving water, and the three that don't still evoke an overall sense of ebb and flow by referring to air and light in aquatic terminology. The album seems to have washed up on the shore of a gray-green river in Flannery O'Connor's South, wrapped in moss and obscured by murky waters.

Knife in the Water are often lumped in with fellow Southern Gothic rockers like Bonnie "Prince" Billy and Southwestern Neo-country kids like Calexico and The Handsome Family. I have a slightly more off-the-wall reference to make: The Association. Listening to the chord progression of "Kill a Tiger", I hear "Never my Love", and the backup "Bom, bom, bom"s of "The Very Air" are overtly reminiscent of "Cherish". "The Very Air"'s rhythm section conjures enough of The Zombies' "Time of the Season" to make the group sound as retro as a Belle and Sebastian record played at the wrong speed.

Lyrics get center stage here, and a look at the words to any given song is borderline overwhelming, but Aaron Blount makes dense passages such as "Disruption in the pattern of your sleep; mercy misleading wherever you find meaning; involuntary breath of the very air sucking everywhere," sound as effortlessly married to the melancholic-pop melody as some of Morrissey's finest work.

Knife in the Water are Low's funky cousins, the younger siblings of Yo la Tengo, and the reflection in troubled waters of Opal/Mazzy Star. They write Murder Ballads that would do Nick Cave proud. These songs tell the tales of widows drowning themselves underneath serene pine trees ("Massacre"), and of floods that wash away entire towns ("Decoration Day Flood"). The sublime "Biltmora Children" plays like the soundtrack to a Sally Mann gallery opening, depicting naked children in eerie scenes almost suggestive of a premonition of their deaths. "My Skin Covers the Waterfront" describes a murderer throwing the remains of his mutilated victims' bodies into, you guessed it, a large body of water. While these are, undoubtedly, treacherous journeys through bone-chillingly isolated patches of wilderness, Aaron Blount and Laura Krause's reassuring vocals function as Hansel and Gretel's breadcrumb path, showing us that there is a way out of the darkness. In "Warped Pearls", Krause sounds absolutely holy -- a choirgirl coerced into singing about horrific deeds.

With all the recurring themes of various characters fighting for control, of bodies being submerged in water in one song, then pulled from the tide in the next, of fireworks and "Decoration Days" taking place both in towns and underwater, I wonder if Cut the Cord might be a cohesive concept album. Suffice it to say that the songs hang together artfully, strung together like so many "Warped Pearls", to tell one story -- or many stories that relate to one another, if only abstractly.