This music feels delicate to the point of transparency, very beautiful perhaps because it’s at risk of fading into the quiet.  Yet it’s also quite powerful, the wisp of a thing that matters, cupped against the elements so that it won’t blow out.

“Would you leave with me?” she asks, and the song suddenly opens from claustrophobia into open-ended-ness.

The singer flutters in the center of lingering overtones, a candleflame not quite guttering in the gloom.  “For here, there is nothing, nobody sleeps, there’s just the working, again and again,” she whispers, before riding an updraft into a more optimistic key.

These cuts aren’t stuffed with extra notes; rather they make the most of a few tones left out in the air to warp and continue.  In “Here,” vibrations bloom and fade over long intervals, like church organs stirring devotion.

This track layers that delicate sweetness with overdubs, creating a kind of polyphonic chorus against seething layers of sustained dissonance and rattling drums (the improvisatory percussionist Theo Guttenplan).

“oh-ho-ho,” she trills in minimalist “The Hammer Strikes the Bell,” her caressing voice bridging the gap between nightmare dread and the songs your mother used to sing you to help you sleep.

“Awful things happen every day…to those who don’t deserve it,” he murmurs, setting a dystopian mood that persists throughout the record.  But later, it’s her tremulous voice that defines Goodness, soft, lullaby sweet and faintly tinged with doom.

The artist — full name Theodora Laird — enlists her father, Trevor Laird, a celebrated Afro-British actor, to murmur short, disturbing poetry in the disc’s first two cuts.  His quiet, sure voice cuts through a powerline buzz.

Its human vulnerability comes framed by low, ominous sounds, a baritone guitar played by friend and collaborator Caius Williams, the haunted backdrop of hovering synths.

Ah, well, that seems fine. It's a very good record, fwiw

18 of 20

It’s better than the first one, which is saying something.

Bankrupting insurance companies sounds good but really why not firing squads?

It’s an ACA with a max out of pocket that would hurt A LOT but i could do it.

No one exercises more than i do.

And it’s always a mistake

Pretty sure I've still got a token in my change pile