A beautiful, brilliantly experimental folk fifth album by the Chicago singer-songwriter, with seven songs of alternative structures, guitar tunings, grief, loss and dizzying displacement, intimacy and energy, lyrical images of caves, shepherds, sheep, ribs and rivers. Aided by producer and multi-instrumentalist Kevin Copeland, this is not your average folk album, but filled with surprising moments and Joni Mitchell- or Joanna Newsom-level innovations, from the strangely bent notes and oddball rhythms of Floodplain to the interwoven lines of Woolgathering, the leaps and lulls of opener Bronwyn, or the title track, which trips along catchily with strangely syncopated rhythms, unusual guitar and banjo fingering and melodious, wounded grief along like a rattling truck down a dusty road on a southern plane (“I cannot be without me…”) to a crying, yearning lap steel. Her voice has that lingering, Mitchell-like power and melancholy too, reminiscent of the Hejira album. Then there’s the gorgeous stillness of Husk, or on the closing track Haunted Landscape, Echoing Cave, with gentle twittering saxophone decorations around a surprising dub-like strut. Utterly transfixing, alternative, original and gorgeous. Out on Ruination Records
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