Basia Bulat - Are You In Love?

Somewhere in the middle of making her fifth album, Bulat took almost a whole year off. Because she had fallen in love, because her father died, because she had lost her sense of beauty and where it might be hidden. "The desert exposes you," she admits. "There's nowhere to hide." "Throughout this whole record, I was struggling between keeping it together and letting go," she explains, "between holding onto old narratives or accepting what's before me." There was death and grief, but also forgiveness, reinvention and love: "coming to terms with the past and acceptance of the present and trying to stay open to the future."

The result is an album that's gorgeous and startling, quietly strange, a shining desert record with a bit of dusty rose over all its 13 tracks. Are You in Love? is searching and certain; it's the sound of a singer who's refusing to hide. The title track sashays like a girl-group classic; "No Control" flashes like that group's hard stare. "Already Forgiven" ripples with reverb like a ribbon in a windstorm, whereas "Your Girl" is cruising down the highway - with Bulat doing her best Christine McVie. "Love Is At The End of the World," the album's gradually thunderous closing tune, is one of the most thrilling things Bulat has ever created: a blazing, incandescent ever-after, all raw electric hope.