Seven Autumn Flowers

For eight years now, Bobby Wratten of Trembling Blue Stars has been composing startlingly intimate, deeply emotional love songs that deal with infatuation and obsession, longing and lust, rapture and regret. In spirit, his work recalls the youthful candor of seventies singer-songwriters like Jackson Browne and Joni Mitchell as well as the melancholic romanticism of Nick Drake. In sound, however, his material is far more up to the minute, artfully incorporating elements of electronic dance music and computer-generated ambient touches.

TBS songs are often heartbreakingly specific. A girl stands poised before a jukebox, intently contemplating the ten plays she'll get for a dollar. A man at an airport terminal window turns his back on a departing plane, unable to watch his lover leave and, perhaps, a relationship end. A couple takes a respite from their troubles and the din of the city by dozing off side by side in the pastoral oasis of London's Kensington Gardens. While there is a brooding tone to the album, the overall mood is brighter and more hopeful than on prior discs - -a hint of the dawn that all the late-night darkness had promised at its end. The arrangements are simple but almost cinematically stirring, with bedroom instrumentation yielding big-screen effects.