Friday, April 20, 2007

KRISTIN HERSH"Learn to Sing Like a Star"Yep RocDOLOREAN"You Can't Win"Yep Roc

"IF YOU LIVED HERE / You'd be home now / And suicidal," warns Kristin Hersh on "Learn to Sing Like a Star," her first album for Yep Roc. The former Throwing Muse has always had a taste for the dramatic, and though she no longer records for 4AD, she hasn't forsaken that label's goth-folk sensibility. In fact, this self-produced disc is her most atmospheric solo outing, with swooping strings and rasping guitars parrying her voice, whose multi-tracked cooing sometimes mingles with a growl.

It doesn't always work, and a trio of fragmentary instrumentals, one playfully titled "Christian Hearse," are mere stalling actions. But this album's fidgety arrangements befit such emotionally frazzled material as "Nerve Endings" and "Vertigo" better than the simple guitar-and-voice mode of her previous solo albums. Hersh's imagistic lyrics, which invoke such mysteries as "the ozone snow," can be a little vague. So when "Wild Vanilla" (the "suicidal" song) laments that "you messing with my head makes a terrible noise," a little guitar racket nicely clarifies her state of mind.

Oregon singer-songwriter Al James, a.k.a. Dolorean, is also fond of cold-weather imagery. "Winter comes and everybody's gone," he softly announces in "We Winter Wrens," the first number on "You Can't Win" with a full set of lyrics. (The opening track is the title song, which just repeats its three-word phrase.) A one-man band that both extols and regrets the solitary life, Dolorean makes his own company, layering vocals atop piano or acoustic-guitar settings, which sometimes swell to elaborate but never overstated arrangements. A few of the tunes are too wispy and hushed, but such off-season meditations as "Beachcomber Blues" are just lonesome enough.

-- Mark Jenkins

Appearing Thursday at Iota with the McCarricks.

Listen to an audio clip of Kristin Hersh

Listen to an audio clip of Dolorean