KEREN ANN - 101

Keren Ann is awfully easy to miss in a crowd. With neither the bluster and raw sensuality of a neo-soul belter nor the esoteric, quirky delivery of an indie poster girl, she's hardly one to command your ear immediately. Instead, she's more of the Charlotte Gainsbourg mold—cool to the point of being vaguely flat (both in key and emotion), it's easy for detractors to dismiss her entirely as having a rather underdone quality.

But if one takes a moment to view that 'underdoneness' as instead being understatedness, Ann's stock rises fast. For nothing about her music ever sounds desperate to impress—she goes about her business with a quiet intelligence and tasteful sophistication. The respectful space she gives her listener to either stay and soak in it or simply just get up and walk away may leave her open to abandonment, but it also creates a far stronger bond with those who opt in.

All that said, if an artist as demure as Keren Ann could ever be accused of going for the jugular, it would be on her latest, 101. This disc is by far her most varied in approach, and also boasts both her most poppy and most orchestrally heavy tunes.

Her previous self-titled effort had a minor breakthrough with the hushed, Velvet Underground-style tremor of "Lay Your Head Down"—a terrific song that muted its insistent 4/4 pulse as though it was afraid to be too direct. 101's "My Name Is Trouble", however, has no such reservations, opening the album with a steady, bass-driven groove that is miles away from the tentative beginnings of past efforts like 2003's lovely Not Going Anywhere. Then throughout, Ann is increasingly eager to try out new ways of communicating her thoughtful takes on the woes of love. The haunted commitment of "Run With You"; the tight, palm-muted pop of "Sugar Mama"; the giddy barroom piano of "Blood On My Hands"—all of these display sides of Ann that, while not wildly divergent, are new takes on her normally one-dimensional delivery.

In the end, the furthest askew she ventures is on the album closer and title track. At first, "101" is a fairly straight-forward slice of couture Parisian orch-pop right from the (Serge) Gainsbourg playbook, with Ann counting down from 101 in detached, breathy spoken-word and matching each number to a different item. The items listed are at first rather random, occasionally hitting on a well-known combo ("78 revolutions per minute", for example). But as the countdown nears its conclusion, the iconography suddenly becomes increasingly religious: "12 tribes of Israel", "7 days of creation", "5 books of Moses", "2 tablets of stone" and, finally, "one God". It's a jarring conclusion that not only has one hitting replay again to try and catch an earlier pattern they might have missed, but which also serves as a vivid reminder that part of this singer's mixed lineage is traced back to Israel.

It's a bit of a funny feeling to have such naked proclamation of faith wrapping up an album that is more concerned with examining secular concerns. But then again, it's precisely this sense of boldness that has been lacking from Keren Ann's past efforts. No one's going to confuse her with a protest singer or a confrontational artist, but with 101 she's found a way to stand slightly further out from the crowd while retaining her quiet smarts.