Surprise package this, exploring the softer sides of two musicians with a prevalence for noisier climes. Serenity Knolls fits neatly into a certain soundtrack niche, wallowing in an expansive languidness, a mournful high-lonesome sound borrowing from Ry Cooder's Southern Comfort and Bruce Langhorne's The Hired Hand. Saft might be better known for his keyboard playing, but here his rudimentary way with strings entwines with post-rocker Brovold's guitar to invoke the type of topographies familiar to readers of Larry Brown and Ron Rash. Burnished arpeggios and electro-glide shimmer forge the contours of a terroir before shallow-grave surrealism pervades. Every coaxed and feathered note-cluster promises another ecstatic huckleberry vision, of black spruce and balsam fir, of cottontail and box turtles… of a dismembered cadaver slowly rotting away in some backwater cypress swamp.