If the natural world offers a backdrop for the delicate chamber folk on Horse Feathers’ sophomore album, Mother Nature’s mercurial tendencies provide singer/songwriter Justin Ringle with his guiding ethos. On “Starving Robins,” a spiderweb of fingerpicked guitar offsets twin tableaux of his own lost innocence and fauna striving to survive the frost; on “The Drought,” over a bed of sluggish strings that rise like a swarm of locusts, birds struggle beneath the rays of an unrelenting sun. These songs have a cruel beauty.