Kris Delmhorst
Album: Blood Test
Label: Signature Sounds
Tracks: 12
Website: http://www.krisdelmhorst.com

Massachusetts-based singer-songwriter Kris has returned to her native Brooklyn to record her latest (seventh) album, Blood Test, which marks her return to the songwriting arena after a five-year interval since 2008's Shotgun Singer, a layoff occasioned by the birth of her daughter with husband Jeffrey Foucault. This stunning collection of new songs really delivers, and is inevitably informed by her fresh vantage point, one which she describes as a "deepened empathy, a broader perspective on the continuum of lives".

The album opens in style with the title song, a quest to ascertain the reality of love, and the compassionate, if also cautionary Homeless, after which 92nd Street (the first of the dozen songs to be written, coming after over a year of writer's block) takes on emotional and thematic resonances from the sense of place. The gentler spaces of Little Frame and the intensely nostalgic My Ohio provide album highlights in between the rockier, electric adventures of Saw It All and We Deliver, while the mesmeric insights of Bees convey a puzzlement at the frayed condition of the human soul and the dark Hushabye manages also to embody a quality of sublimity. And yet these songs all maintain the linking theme, and natural hypothesis, that although we're all just passing through life, "everything we have done and seen and been and felt has led to this day".

Kris's alluring singing style greatly aids in the communication of her life-vision, of course, but there's both honesty and attitude alongside the seduction. Kris's small backing band, assembled by co-producer Anders Parker, consists of Mark Spencer and Konrad Meissner, and together they provide a taut-sounding yet surprisingly fluid, and consistently interesting, backdrop that brings a fresh and dynamic driving tension to these songs.

Textures and arrangements are informed both by s/s Americana and the jangly power-pop of Cars (recalling Kris's unexpected album of Cars covers that came out a couple of years back), but Kris's special voice unites these and other musical climates in an album that displays a potent acknowledgement of her new life and intentions, of which motherhood is but one aspect.

David Kidman