Robin Holcomb is a shy suburban mom who worked as a sharecropper in North Carolina and a cutting-edge composer in downtown Manhattan. On her second album of songs, Rockabye, Holcomb steps further into an eerie landscape that is both deeply traditional and avant-garde.

Holcomb's first album with vocals (Robin Holcomb, 1990) – she previously recorded two instrumental albums – initially seemed morose and pretentious. Hundreds of listens later, it stands as a powerful work, knotting strands of jazz and bluegrass with lyrics that hang in the air like smoke. Much of that album's beauty lay in its stark simplicity. The follow-up is more complex and challenging.

Holcomb's vocals are still an acquired taste, and on Rockabye she is even more idiosyncratic, wavering with a backwoods warble on "Help a Man" and a gospelly fervor on "When I Stop Crying." Her backing band is louder this time, egged on by Peter Holsapple, who produced two tracks. In fact, the closing "Natural World" finds Holcomb almost swamped by seven musicians and three backup singers; she is better in her purest form, as on the piano-and-vocal "Widowmaker."

Holcomb's husband, organist Wayne Horvitz, who produced Rockabye, also plays on it, as does guitarist Bill Frisell, who contributes a couple of exhilarating solos. Holcomb's piano work, however, is the album's guiding light. Typically minimalistic and graceful, she can also pound the band through a raveup like "When Was the Last Time" or shuffle through the instrumental "Dixie."

Holcomb's lyrics resonate as finely as her playing and her voice. Her central themes are the cycles of nature and the soul; she approaches them obliquely with tantalizing lines like "A man hoes a hall that the sun hasn't hit/On a day you can smell the Pacific/Liquor on the breath of a wind bearing rain." Achingly painful and suddenly tender, Robin Holcomb's songs mirror a beguiling, bewildering world. (RS 642)

WIF STENGER