Album: K D Lang

Watershed (Nonesuch)

This is Lang's first album of new material since 2000's Invincible Summer, a relaxed schedule that works to the benefit of her material. And though most of the songs are, like Adele's, about love and relationships, and use similar country/folk/ jazz arrangements, there's a sophistication of outlook that lifts them above the merely adolescent, while lang's delivery is achingly perfect, her haunted croon somehow at once evoking desire and despair on tracks such as "Once in a While", "I Dream of Spring" and the languidly lustful "Sunday".

The album's latter stages delve deeper into lang's psyche, confronting her loss of faith in "Jealous Dog", asking "Does the taste for truth disappear with youth?" in "Shadow and the Frame", and cursing her own self-critical character in "Flame of the Uninspired", a salutary rumination on ambition and compromise, marked by a desolate beauty all her own. Well worth the wait.

Download this: 'Flame of the Uninspired', 'Sunday', 'Once in a While', 'I Dream of Spring', 'Coming Home'