Perishable Fruit

The result is an unusual soundscape where all the percussion arrives with a twang, and where delicate acoustic arpeggios are set against sustained electric-guitar drones. The presence of so many stringed-instrument parts creates a big space, but the absence of keyboard chords and reverberating drums also opens up a lot of room within that space. Larkin takes advantage of this room to sing in a whispery, intimate voice about a woman who feels suffocated by old houses, old stories, old fears, old lovers, old arguments, and old music and wants to hit the road, read a new book, get out of the car, take a deep breath, let go of the mace, and pick up a red accordion.

Larkin has a way with words, whether describing the narrow choices imposed by poverty ("You don't say no with an empty belly and a barbed-wire bonnet on a wolf hangin' at your door") or love gone wrong ("I saw you as you drove away, ... you checked yourself in the rearview mirror"). But it's her ability to match these words with a new kind of country/folk/pop/chamber music that makes this album so special. When Larkin sings of drowning in commitments and restrictions on "Coming Up for Air," the arrangement has a thick, underwater drowsiness, but when she declares on the chorus she's "coming up for air, rising to a very new somewhere," the melody breaks free and shines like a fish leaping in the sun. --Geoffrey Himes