Abbey Sings Abbey

On this new album she performs exclusively personal songs, carefully chosen from the nine recordings she made for Verve over the last fifteen years. With a consummate sense of theatre, alternating slow, crepuscular ballads - almost static in their imperceptible unfolding - and songs of timeless sophistication with melodies that are more archaistic, at the frontiers of country-music and folk, she, using little, almost secret Impressionist touches, recapitulates the skillfully "natural" art of phrasing with all its intimate deployments, breaks and suspensions, revealing the magic spells of a rift that can't be confessed while plucking constantly at the strings of emotion with discretion and restraint and distilling, in its slightest inflexions, melancholy that is literally overwhelming.