Midnight Choir: Unsung Heroine CD

Norway's Midnight Choir create dramatic - sometimes melodramatic - tension through simplicity and subtlety. To capture their pretty and often quiet songs, they turned to engineer Phill Brown and producer Chris Eckman, with whom they worked on their previous album, Amsterdam Stranded. Brown's recording manifests the detail and dynamics in a style similar to his work with Talk Talk, Mark Hollis, John Martyn, and the Walkabouts (for whom Eckman sings and plays guitar). The careful arrangements employ variations in texture, instrumentaton and dynamics to convey these introspective songs and Al Bystrom's songwriting displays the influence of Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, and Richard Thompson, but creates an end result distinctly his own. (Glitterhouse, Gruner Weg 25, 37688 Beverungen, Germany, www.glitterhouse.com)