Is Nellie McKay losing her edge, or is she just feeling blue? Just a few short years after her debut, which she recorded as a precociously talented and knowing young woman, she sounds a bit weary on her fifth full-length, the scattered and distracted . It may be her most intensely, intently melancholy album yet, which actually sounds promising: Under her perky persona McKay has always hidden a prickly disposition, and the witty dissonance between her wry lyrics and her spry, eclectic music implied a gleefully subversive mission. In that regard, she's always been as much an acolyte of Randy Newman as of Doris Day, despite fêting the latter on last year's solid covers album, .