Album Reviews

The timbre may have deepened, though almost imperceptibly, but caressing the soft, melodic waves of this set of tidily drawn, dreamy reveries, k.d. lang's voice remains a magnificent, mellifluous instrument.

The album deftly and gently traces the soft arc of a love affair, slipping friction-free from cool desire ('I Dream of Spring'), to dreamy anticipation ('Je Fais La Planche'), to the comfort and familiarity of romantic focus—though with an eye to the potential for calamity ('Coming Home'), to the dizziness, exaltation and shared promises of the connection ('Once in a While'), only to backslide into the precariousness and vulnerability of giving in ('Thread'), to pleasant stasis and secure intimacy ('Close Your Eyes,' 'Sunday'), to the inevitable, uncompromising fall 'straight on to the beaten path, then face down into its aftermath' and laying blame ('Flame of the Uninspired,' 'Upstream,'), to dark self-discovery ('Shadow and the Frame'), and finally to self-recrimination ''the message in this monologue, to never be a jealous dog' ('Jealous Dog').

Viewed from a safe distance, with wounds mostly healed, lang is able to avoid the bruising conflicts and the deep wounds and instead looks back to find both the pleasures and regrets, perhaps in the end seeing it as a 'watershed' event, with lessons learned for a better result in the next go round, and then again perhaps not!

The soft, intimately recorded mix of acoustic and pedal-steel guitars, banjo, drums, drum machines and smartly meandering strings (and on 'Coming Home' a bongo part lifted from Roy's 'Leah') provide a gliding, relaxing, enveloping backdrop for lang's intimacies.

While you'll never mistake this for the analog transparency and delicacy of Shelby Lynne's latest or the Norah Jones catalog, however this was recorded and at whatever resolution, engineer Lynne Earls has done a superb and sympathetic job of mirroring lang's intentions in the recording of the individual instruments, as has David Leonard in how the various elements spring to life, well-focused within his impressively three-dimensional, well-organized mix. lang's closely-miked, dryly recorded, tonally forward voice, has excellent focus and clarity.

Sonically and musically, Watershed is a coherent and sophisticated work of original, very personal songs (written by lang alone or in collaboration, mostly with her longtime musical associates Ben Mink and David Piltch) that surely have universal appeal to anyone who's loved and let him or herself down.