The premise is disarmingly simple. Chayton, an elderly Cheyenne man born and raised on a reservation, feels his life drawing to a close. He has one task left, which is to pass on the values, faith, customs and political memory of his people to Tokala, a young man of the tribe who now lives comfortably in a world his elders would scarcely recognise. The album charts the stages of that handover, track by track, like a long conversation held on a porch as the light fades.

What lifts the record above the pious is the character of Chayton himself. Donelli and Rossi could easily have written a stern patriarch wagging a finger at the young and the digital. Instead they give us a teacher of uncommon grace, curious and patient, entirely free of dogma. He never demands that Tokala abandon the present for a vanished past. He asks only that the boy keep whatever is worth keeping. By the closing track, the old man is urging his young friend to live freely and to embrace the new, and he sees no contradiction in carrying an ancient inheritance into that future. It is a wise and generous resolution, and it lands with real emotional force precisely because the album has earned it.

There is a smart piece of misdirection at work here. The story of the Great Lakes peoples is the vehicle, but the destination is closer to home for all of us. Should long-standing reference points, whether religious, social, ideological or rooted in identity, be discarded as clutter, or can they still steady us as everything around us shifts? Lesser records would have shouted their answer. This one lets the question hang in the air, and lets Chayton's gentle example do the arguing. Anyone who has ever stood between their grandparents' world and their own will feel the tug of it.

Concept albums live or die on their pacing, and the sequencing here is admirably patient. The narrative unfolds without lurching or lecturing, each chapter handing the listener on to the next with the assurance of a practised storyteller. Donelli and Rossi understand that a story about transmission must itself be transmitted carefully. They never hurry the listener, and they never talk down to them. The result is an album that rewards attention and improves on each return, the sort of record that keeps opening new rooms.

It would be easy to call the subject matter timely, and it is, but that undersells it. Questions of memory, belonging and cultural survival will not go out of fashion, and this album treats them with the seriousness and humanity they deserve. It is a work of empathy rather than pastiche, respectful of its subject without turning it into a museum piece.

*Adorati Spiriti* is an ambitious, warm-hearted and thoroughly thoughtful record, and it marks Donelli and Rossi out as storytellers worth following. Play it in full, in the evening, without distractions. Chayton has something to tell you, and he tells it beautifully.