Bic Runga: Birds

Herald rating: * * * *

She took six years between her big-selling debut Drive and her bigger-selling follow-up Beautiful Collision.

So the three-year gap and the reported relative ease of recording - wrote some songs, got some famous mates in, took over a stately home in Hillsborough as a studio - may well indicate she's gone and rushed things a bit. That makes sense after the painstaking stop-start globetrotting experience of Beautiful Collision, which in the end made for an album that, as good as it was, suffered from some weak songs and some incohesiveness.

The first thing that impresses about Birds is that its 11 tracks certainly flock together.

Stylistically, it dallies in the blues, country, and a song or two that suggests something rubbed off on Runga from her time in Paris. There are also sundry tracks of sweet Bic-pop - the relatively upbeat opening track and single Winning Arrow and the airy Listen.

But they all coalesce into something of an 11-part drama of romance, heartbreak, desire, despair and occasional bouts of backwoods weirdness.

There's something decidedly Gothic happening around the edges of this - helped by the palpable atmosphere evoked by the sound of the recording at Monte Cecilia House (Cecilia is the patron saint of music).

There's also a sense that Runga is working from a wider musical palette than she has before, or than most any of her young female singer-songwriter contemporaries.

The aforementioned Winning Arrow has a trace of the Smiths and Carole King; If I Had You has hints of Hank Williams and classic Burt Bacharach who'd be proud to have penned the likes of Say After Me.

Some other songs suggest a particularly French brand of heartbreak pop - like the title track, which, after its delicate opening, spirals into something positively psychedelic.

It's around the half-way mark that Birds turns spooky. First there's the slow shimmer of Ruby Nights, which would give Nick Cave insomnia, then the hillbilly twang of No Crying No More suggests her southern roots aren't confined to the Garden City.

Past the romantic pleadings of the aforementioned If I Had You it's into Captured, the album's most haunting moment of an often eerie bunch with Runga's woman-possessed vocal over a beautifully foggy swirl of piano and strings.

There's brief relief from all that minor-key melancholy on That's Alright and the the jaunty Blue Blue Heart.

But then Runga goes and caps it off with It's Over, a slow-burnin', heartbreakin' soul-blues number that wouldn't sound out of place in a David Lynch nightclub scene.

It's a striking ending to an album that will make many wonder whatever happened to that nice Bic Runga, our favourite gal-nextdoor-singer-songwriter. She moved on, took some risks, tapped into something deeper, made her best album yet. That's what.

Label: Sony