Luminous, alluring and slightly menacing, the songs on Kristin Hersh's solo debut sometimes resemble real-life things that make you want to touch them against your better judgment: the plush coat of the polar bear at the zoo or coals glowing orange from the inside. Hips and Makers – beautifully produced by Lenny Kaye – is all about texture but never about excess; its spare, spindly melodies are driven by Hersh's nimble acoustic guitar and girlish, shivery voice. Jane Scarpantoni's cello glides through some of the songs like a restless, rueful specter shrouded in velvet.

But as carefully calibrated as it is, Hips and Makers is surprisingly brawny. Even Hersh's gentlest guitar lines, like the ones that snake through "Houdini Blues," seem to have burrs attached to them. And if her voice – more relaxed and less tortured than it sometimes sounds with her regular outfit, Throwing Muses – seems dusted with gold, it also harbors a sage toughness. On the lacerating "Me and My Charms," she's bruised and accusatory at once; her anger doesn't so much course through her voice as hover around it like a buzzing nimbus.

Hersh's lyrics, as always, are loopy, sometimes to the point of being impenetrable. But even if you're not 100 percent sure what she means by "It's the blaze across my nightgown," your subconscious can fill in the blanks. Feeling a cat's fur in the dark is a pleasure unto itself; there's no need to know what color it is. (RS 679)

STEPHANIE ZACHAREK