Baby, I wish I was dead," sings Hope Sandoval on "Halah," the opening cut of Mazzy Star's coldly beautiful album She Hangs Brightly, and in her resignation she sounds almost elated. It's a line – and a moment – that perfectly embodies Mazzy Star's sinister charm.

Mazzy Star's mastermind, noted California songwriter and producer David Roback, a former member of the bands Rain Parade, Clay Allison and Opal, has always been adept at swathing his music in chilling but romantic gloom. With Mazzy Star, he seems to have perfected his method, the most essential element of which is to enlist a woman vocalist with a cool, flat voice, a singer whose emotional resonance stems almost entirely from her seeming detachment. Sandoval is no exception to this rule: Her dispassionate voice is incredibly effective at building up the sort of slow, psychedelic tension that Roback's songs revel in.

Roback has always looked to the late Sixties for inspiration, and Mazzy Star is imbued with the sounds of that era. "Ghost Highway" and the title track, in particular, with their churning, two-chord organ backgrounds, sound bizarrely Doors-like, though the Velvet Underground is, as usual, Roback's main point of reference. "Be My Angel" ends with a Revolver-era Beatles riff, and songs like "Free," "Ride It On," "Taste of Blood" and "Give You My Lovin'" are all possessed of a twisted country lethargy.

For all its slow, acoustic qualities, Mazzy Star could not be called folkie, however. Despite the band's snaillike pace, there's something inherently electric about Sandoval's ethereal vocals and the hypnotic strumming behind them. The music is a foreboding, sluggish swirl of dark sound and fragile melody, and the sentiments are, to put it mildly, bleak. The songs on She Hangs Brightly are undanceable, unhummable, yet compelling. Ultimately, Mazzy Star's hypnotic music, like Sandoval's voice, is as entrancing as the reflection of an ominous night sky on a lake. And its effect is just as disquieting. (RS 586)

GINA ARNOLD