Donna Dean: Kisses and Other Things (digital outlets)

Wilco's Cruel Country of last year was a clever sleight of hand: it was a more traditional kind of country music than alt.country, but managed to be somewhere still to the left of the mainstream.

Donna Dean – one of this country's most under-acknowledged and understated songwriters – manages that dichotomy too: she's in the folk-country genre but tills similar soil as the alt.country people in terms of imagery, the lives of ordinary folk, yearning and a sometimes flatness in her delivery which seems to carry emotional fatigue and almost defeat.

When she sings “waiting for something” in the title track opener of this new album you feel she's been waiting for something/anything forever. And whatever it is probably won't come.

The 2018 documentary of Dean's life The Sound of Her Guitar – which apparently only drew an audience of six to a screening in Gore, the home of country music in New Zealand, but full houses in Auckland and Wellington, and opened the Manitoba Film Festival in Winnipeg – was an insight into a hard upbringing in a violent, alcoholic family in suburban Auckland.

Until music became her redemption and way out.

It's a mark of how respected she is by her peers that Gurf Morlix, Bill Chambers, Amos Garrett, John Egenes, Nigel Gavin and Albert Lee have appeared on Donna Deans' previous albums.

This time out she has the great singers Eliza Gilkyson (on the moving outsider perspective of Do Some Fishing), Liv Cochrane (of Into the East) and Kylie Price plus fiddle player Anna Bowen, trumpeter Finn Scholes, Egenes . . .

Her time in Texas influences the aching and slow Rodriguez with accordion (by Gunther Flutney) and the bluesy The Mold is about breaking free of the violence and abuse (“used to get high to dull the pain . . . I denied the need for love”) by letting go.

A Little Grace (with Kylie Price) is a pointed country ballad of forgiveness, grace and sympathy.

Foot on the Gas might have a message (“fightin' with a neighbour, don't like my behavior, nothing's gonna change with the foot on the gas”) but its jaunty pace is fun.

The musicianship here is supportive, discreetly colours the material and is pinpoint accurate, from the appropriately earthy blues harmonica from Terry Ebeling on Get Your Hands Dirty to the Americana-cum-European cabaret style of Dangerous, a real standout here: “If you're dangerous . . . I'll be careless too . . . if you're reckless, callous and unkind . . . that is what I like . . . you can count on me to lose the fight”.

I'm Okay is a penetrating account from a victim of domestic violence: “dirty table breaks my fall . . . I can't get that stain out of the carpet, big old bruises getting darker. Got to get myself downstairs, fix my makeup and my hair, show the world that I'm okay”.

This is delivered over a relentless throb and her voice an almost monotone until she lifts herself with the lines about that need to put on a face for the world. It is moving and ineffably sad, more so for its simplicity and humanity.

Produced by Dean and multi-instrumentalist Egenes (who wins the Most Valuable Player award), Kisses and Other Things is an emotionally penetrating album and – although there is a lot of Dean's life filtering through these songs – by being couched in engaging, focused songs this doesn't feel like therapy as so many albums currently do (the last two National albums a case in point).

Dean suggests stories rather then tells them and, without resort to any particular details (as on A Little Grace), she creates convincing characters, some of whom you suspect are versions of herself.

It's quite a gift and once again Donna Dean has presented the kind of consistent, artistically realised album others can only aspire to.

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You can hear and buy this album at bandcamp here