"I'm sipping on your hidden stash of whiskey/A little drunker than you know," Jessie Baylin confesses with apt blurred enunciation in "Hurry Hurry." Actually, nothing moves fast in the music or the relationships on her third album. Baylin examines faltering affairs and resigns herself to a lot of waiting in a spacey kind of Dixie soul, like Portishead with a girlish Dusty Springfield at the mic. The effect, in "Joy Is Suspicious" and the title song, is both seductive and distant, as if she’s singing across miles of echo and doubt. This is an album of potent moods. But it would also be good to hear how Baylin, who is married to Kings of Leon drummer Nathan Followill, sounds when filled with joy.

Listen to "Hurry Hurry":

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• Photos: Random Notes

“IRM”

Fashioned to mimic the sound of a magnetic resonance imaging or MRI, "IRM" (the French designation for the brain scan) grew out of Gainsbourg’s love of the sound of the clickety-clack of medical machinery. The IRM album project also marked the fulfillment of two goals for the singer: to document a traumatic experience, and to record an album with Beck. Though her co-creator and producer didn’t necessarily know the details of her water-skiing accident and resulting cerebral hemorrhage (which lead to the IRM of the song's title), he somehow knew how to handle the material. "Beck had a way of guessing what I was thinking and feeling without me telling him," said Gainsbourg. "We never discussed these things explicitly."