A breakup album by a band that is still together, The Swell Season's  "Strict Joy," plays out like a mirror image to its predecessor.

When the songwriting duo of The Frames frontman Glen Hansford and Marketa Irglova starred in 2007 Academy Award winning Irish indie film, "Once," they portrayed a sort of foretelling of their own future together.

Providing all of the original music on the film's soundtrack -- including "Falling Slowly," which won an Academy Award for Best Original Song -- Hansford and Irglova's own real-life relationship drew some attention while fans eagerly awaited the followup, last year's "Strict Joy."

Though Hansford and Czech singer and pianist Irglova have ended their romantic relationship, they've managed a remarkably cohesive record despite its own polarity.

With dreamy string arrangements and horn swells setting an orchestral backdrop to acoustic guitar, mandolin, hand claps and brushed drum strokes, "Strict Joy" sounds like it could have been recorded in a concert theatre and a back yard farmhouse studio all at the same time. It's the same one-ton featherweight that juxtaposes dramatically sad and soulful Hansford against Irglova's soft and delicate singing.

There's an uneven split on the songwriting duties, with Irglova credited for writing only two of the album's 11 tracks, sharing "Fantasy Man," with Hansford and leaving the heartbreak hymnal, "I Have Loved You Wrong," as the sole Irglova-penned song on "Strict Joy." 

The album was produced by Peter Katis (The National, Interpol), who carries occasional keyboard duties along with an array of artists who accompany Hansford and Irglova's four-piece band.

These are mostly sad songs, but hope glimmers throughout, which also reflects the album's title. It was taken from a 1931 collection of poems written by Irish novelist and poet James Stephens, titled, "How St. Patrick Saves the Irish, Strict Joy."

While Stephens was noted for the use of humor in his retellings of Irish myths and fairy tales, The Swell Season's musical interpretation of "Strict Joy" survives the wake of sadness and loss by diving heartfirst into it, re-telling love's demise in various vignettes.

There is no musical version of the poem on the album, but The Swell Season returned with a soundtrack to a piece of literature rather than film.

The album's liner notes are preceded by a tributary photo of Stephens inside the sleeve. On the page behind the author's picture is the poem itself. And the poem closes with the same cathartic wink the album makes, "--And we cared naught that these were mournful things, For, caring them, we made them beautiful."

A version of this story appeared in The Spokesman-Review Newspaper.