Voyageur

Maybe it’s her recent divorce, or maybe it’s her subsequent hook-up with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, but Canadian folkie Kathleen Edwards has given her sound a makeover on her fourth album. With Vernon co-producing, Edwards augments the coffeehouse sparseness of her writerly earlier albums with shimmery surfaces, whoosh-y hovering-spaceship bleeps and gently padding beats, which lend her songs an exquisite, widescreen beauty. Whether she’s chronicling the breakup of her marriage (the seven-minute dirge “For the Record”) or reveling in her new one (the trash-can-beat kickiness of “Sidecar”), Voyageur is the rare post-breakup album that cozies up to the future rather than lashing out at the past.

Listen to “For the Record”:

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