Album: The Mynabirds, What We Lose in the Fire... (Saddle Creek)

Laura Burhenn says she wants her album to be “like Neil Young doing Motown”.

This is fanciful given that it sounds like Cat Power working out of the Brill Building. But that’s not such a bad thing, is it? Better, perhaps, to say what it is rather than what it’s like. It’s pop music, slightly gothic and self-involved, melodic and occasionally crashing, arranged with an eye on the needles twitching in the dramameter, always aware of its generic origins in the “soulful” 1960s. What’s it like? It’s like grimly enjoyable.