“There really is a town called Hopeless,” Freedy Johnston declared in his song “Wheels” a couple years ago. There also really is a town called Faith, a North Carolina burg that’s the home base for songwriter/vocalist/pianist Cliff Retallick and the rest of Mercury Dime. And many of the characters who populate Retallick’s songs (the defiantly estranged couple in “Never Never Boy”, the fella trying to change his ways in the strong album opener “Saving Dough”) are looking to get the hell out of Hopeless and buy a small lot in Faith — or, in the case of the doomed protagonist of “Yellow Room”, a small plot.

True to its title, there is an air of mystery about this album, both lyrically and musically. “Shy Ways Into The Limelight” opens with the line “Your blood on my hands was the only gloves between me and the winter”, and then you’re left to ponder just what has transpired. The closer, “Dog Star”, is similar, except this time it’s a line near the end of the song: “I got a pine box sitting in the corner of my rocking car.” Using freshly manufactured phrases such as “jaguar star” and “pleiades apaloosa (sic)”, Retallick lures you into his strange and cosmic world.

You can hear traces of fellow Carolinians Jolene and a hint of R.E.M. (more than one person has described Retallick’s vocals as “Stipean”), but it’s hard to truly nail Mercury Dime’s sound. Its most compelling trait is the rustic marriage of piano and Darryl Jones’ pedal steel, and despite Mitch Easter’s production on the latter half of the album, there’s nothing here that could be mistaken for a pop sheen. The rollicking “Jacknife Autograph” could be a new Wilco song if Jeff Tweedy had been listening to Terry Allen’s Lubbock: On Everything daily instead of John Cale’s Paris 1919, while “Yellow Room” is an interesting blend of pop-ballad piano, big drums and pedal steel. Eric Carmen writes a country song.