There"s something foreign, and disturbing about Keren Ann Zeidel"s fourth album. The Israeli native doesn"t so much sing, as inhabit her moody compositions, creating haunting soundscapes that are as unsettling as they are beautiful, lingering in the memory long after you"ve put the CD back into its case. The multi-instrumentalist combines a hushed fragility with a fierce poetic austerity--with odd, truncated, inner rhymes--beginning with her rather severe confessional "Not Going Anywhere," to the ghostly specter and strategic awkwardness of "End of May" extending throughout the eleven songs that make up this disquieting collection. The chanteuse has abandoned her former trip-hop posturing that earned her early comparisons to Beth Orton and Portishead"s Beth Gibbons, and instead has adopted an almost hesitant fatalism that chills the listener to the bone. --Jaan Uhelszki