Jennifer O'Connor is not an especially glamorous singer or songwriter. She sings in a capably expressive voice and fashions lyrics that sound straightforward at first but reveal tangles of ambiguities on further listening. Her previous albums have all been strong, modest, and memorable, but rarely showy. This is not to discredit O'Connor. Far from a wallflower, she simply has little patience for artifice, the lack of which lends her music the straightforward appeal of many alt-country singers, although there are few genre elements in her indie-folk-rock. Her fourth album, Here With Me, is packed with predictably sturdy guitars and predictably sympathetic vocals, yet there's no sense that her approach is losing any of its vitality.
In fact, these songs do what O'Connor's songs always do: They draw you in gradually until you realize the full and intricate implications of a line like "I won't let you go, I know you think you're safer on your own." She sings that line on opener "The Church and the River", making it unclear if that is a pledge of love, a promise of protection, or a threat. O'Connor savors concrete details for their evocative powers: "Your jean jacket had a frayed collar on that midnight shopping trip that Christmas Eve," she sings on the plaintive "Valley Road 86", about an old friend who's no longer around. That's the sort of observation that sets up a short story, but here it's buried deep in the song-- a memory that springs to mind unheeded and possibly unwanted.
Despite its overtones of death specifically and loss in general, Here With Me is O'Connor's most hopeful album, reportedly inspired by a happy relationship (which inspired the album cover). "We've got a lot of time to get this right," she sings on the poppy title track, but then qualifies, "at least that's how I hope it's gonna be." Most of these songs explore the tenuousness of any romance, an emotional give and take that O'Connor suggests is as devastating as it is rewarding. So when she admits, "I want you here with me," over crescendoing guitars, she sounds breathless yet triumphantly content.
Produced by John Agnello, Here With Me features a small roster of musicians, including her regular backing trio, who do a fine job of complementing O'Connor's melodies without intruding on her personal space. On "Daylight Out", "Credit in the Cost", and the Liz Phair-ish "Xmas Party" especially, they sound like a well-seasoned road band playing some club out in America somewhere. Still, despite Hold Steady multi-instrumentalist/mustache aficionado Franz Nicolay adding piano and accordion flourishes, the album can't quite match Over the Mountain, Across the Valley and Back to the Stars for openness and range of sound, although occasionally the band pull off a nice moment of startling invention, such as the way the scribbly guitars align into a dramatic fanfare on "Landmine". Ultimately, Here With Me sounds perhaps too stripped-down and murky for the Starbucks set, while naked confessions like "I want to give myself to you/ I want to give and give and give" may scare off indie listeners used to a little more emotional distance in their singer-songwriters. It's their loss: In following her muse, O'Connor makes not fitting sound like an incomparable virtue.
