A year after her auspicious major-label debut, the Canadian singer and songwriter Jane Siberry has released an intricate, enchanting follow-up that extends the emotional and musical range of her sly song-sketches and elicits comparisons to Laurie Anderson and Kate Bush. Like Anderson, Siberry buoys rote Eighties anomie with droll, black humor, creating a vision of a nuclearage vaudeville. And like Bush, she and her five-piece band conduct a hopscotch of swirls, squalls, bursts and loops with palpable delight. But these comparisons are valid only as reference points, because Siberry's bittersweet, rustic epiphanies have few precedents.

In "The Empty City," she uses tourism as a metaphor for the wonderment that fills her songs, as a subtle electronic setting lurches carefully behind her. The cramped verses burst into a robust chorus, and suddenly Siberry is contemplating inarticulateness – reproaching herself for writing about birds ("reminds me of dumb girls and bad poetry") and observing "a crystalline set of dominoes/Except not really crystalline/And sort of domino-like/But not really."

Similar empirical bursts fill the other seven songs, her desultory narratives and sudden juxtapositions transposing logic and welcoming illusion. In "The Very Large Hat," amid a percussive tangle reminiscent of Peter Gabriel, the ambiguity turns giddy: "It takes two days to get there by train/Two days to get there by boat/It takes forever if you go by inertia/No time if you don't believe in time." Similar echoes dominate "Mein Bitte," where a worker adores her job and curses it, and provide a moving detail to the lovely acoustic track "The Taxi Ride," in which a sudden distraction animates the tale of a daylight separation.

But in her engagement with small moments, Siberry sometimes neglects the basics. "Vladimir Vladimir" is a three-part collage too formless to sustain its seven minutes. And although the melodies on The Speckless Sky are more generous than those on last year's No Borders Here – especially the vernal "One More Colour," which gives the album its title – Siberry still relies on gnomic asides to sustain her lesser material. Witnessing her fast progress and knowing that these songs were recorded a year ago, though, one can't help but believe her new material will erase any lingering qualms. (RS 475)

ROB TANNENBAUM