Darkest folk rock ballads. Breathy, naked, moving female vocals. Minimal, slow, lo-fi, and spellbinding. Mostly just acoustic guitars, voice, and tape hiss... with some other bits like violin here and there. While disconcertingly dark, this record is far more uplifting than it is depressing... thanks to Darby’s gift for employing sadness and death as a frame for life and beauty. No artist I’ve ever encountered can do this like she can. This album (her third) is inspired by a documentary about Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries (essentially a slavery/torture ring run by “The Sisters Of Charity” in Dubln from the 1840s until 1996). Self-recorded onto cassette 4-track. FCC clean. All songs killer... certainly in my top 10 for 2005. Start with 5, 6, 9.

1. Lo-fi, bouncy, and dark folk rock. A brief revisiting of a song from her previous album that presages this one.
2. Haunting, very slow ballad about escaping death. “You bloom and die.”
3. Mid-tempo and more fleshed-out instrumentally than most tracks here. So beautiful.
4. Very spooky, quiet recounting of a murder... presumably by the murderess. Features violin and piano. Extremely lo-fi (Darby’s cassette recorder was dying as she made this album and you can tell.)
==> 5. As happy as this record gets. Uplifting lyrics delivered with profound knowledge of sadness and pain. Darby writes, “It’s the world I wanted to give the women in the Laundries and to anyone that is suffering.”
==> 6. Slow, somewhat creepy... makes me think of a slow, acoustic, dark, percussionless Broadcast. Darby double-tracks her vocals to eerie effect.
7. Swaying ode to a “beautiful creature and when daylight comes she disappears, just because she isn’t like all the others.”
8. Dark folk ballad, spoken to the women of the Magdelene Laundries. Darby writes that she “wanted to give them images to keep in their minds that no one could take away.”
==> 9. Gorgeous, subtle harmony vocals. “You can run for years. But there’s no leaving now.”
10. Incredibly sad. Darby recounts her writing of the song: “...when I was finished I was trembling. I was scared of myself... I was scared to let anyone know what had just come out of me.”