You Are Free

The first album in four years from Chan Marshall is dark, disturbing, and lullabyish. It inhabits the same chilly, twilit, southern gothic world as Palace and Smog.

The music is intimate, naked, lugubrious, and mesmerizingly slow, with instrumentation stripped down to the skeleton. Marshall's ethereal voice is not so much haunting as spooky. Released on Matador, this American album is a must-listen.