Utopian Ashes is an album, to borrow from William Blake, of songs of experience. Bobby Gillespie and Jehnny Beth’s collection of duets is not a break-up record, but it does tell the story of a married couple facing up to love breaking down, the impossibility of real communication and other unavoidable outcomes of a full life. It is not a Primal Scream album, although it features Primal Scream’s Andrew Innes on guitar, Martin Duffy on piano and Darrin Mooney on drums, with Jehnny Beth’s musical partner Johnny Hostile on bass. And it draws on the tradition of Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris’sGrievous Angel, George Jones and Tammy Wynette’s We Go Together and other country soul classics to deal, in a straight-talking fashion, with the heavy realities of love, loss, disconnection and ultimately redemption. As Gillespie says: “Emotional inarticulacy is at the crux of it.”