keren ann (2007)

SOME VELVET MORNING Keren Ann channels Lee Hazelwood and the Underground on her satisfying, yet dark, new self-titled CD

On 2004's Not Going Anywhere, Israeli-born Parisian Keren Ann Zeidel seemed like another gauzy Norah Jones-style pop chanteuse. But her records have gotten steadily, and fetchingly, stranger. Her latest, keren ann, is a coiled soft-rock song cycle about love's wreckage that, like her recent Lady & Bird side project, echoes pastoral '60s and '70s psychedelia. But the beauty is often dark and sepulchral, recalling early Velvet Underground and the hallucinatory country noir of Lee Hazelwood in particular. Sung in English, it's still très French. A-