Pitchfork

Kristin Hersh has been a great many things: the snakecharmer, the Queen Mum of indie rock, Vic Chesnutt's biggest supporter, and fan-friendly (to a fault). But I like to think of her as a veteran major league pitcher-- though she may slump and streak, she still keeps up the high baseline output that justifies contracts the size of Denmark's gross national product. You get what you pay for, and Hersh is always a bargain.

Sunny Border Blue-- god, is it really her fourth solo full-length already?-- lacks both the expansive, electronic band-backed arrangements of Sky Motel and the too-sparse skeletal sound of Strange Angels. Here, horns, organ, piano and ambient vinyl noise dress up Hersh's guitar-vox-barstool aesthetic nicely and efficiently. Little else is required. No electric rockers to bring down the house. Alas, poor Muses, we knew them well.

Like anyone who spends too much time in the studio over the years, Hersh has logged enough hours tinkering with other instruments to arrive at the point where she can proudly add that liner note to the effect that "all instruments [were] played by" you-know-who. Diminutive, but mom-tough, Hersh casually cusses her way through a baker's dozen songs that are as personal as ever, and far less cryptic than in the past. Her voice remains creaky and pregnant with emotion, matched against her signature bright-toned Collings guitars.

"White Suckers" is representative of this slight reinvention of solo Hersh. Moving from the plodding and fingerpicked verses, the song metamorphasizes with a trumpet player (Kristin?!) shifting into uptempo gear for a California-dreamin' chorus sporting fractured words like: "You come off like a distant moth, aimless and driven." The once-a-disc "'Gazebo Tree' moment" comes early in the album, this time with the sublime "Spain," a hissing crescendo of organ, melody and vowels. The innocuous opening slowly seethes into a classic Kristin barrage, belting out lines like: "Sucking down mother's milk/ Singing my throat away/ It's not an awful secret, you know/ It's just a secret."

A moving cover of Cat Stevens' "Trouble" is a welcome curveball, prompting a little more campfire-style swaying and head-bobbing in the audience than normal (i.e. none). "Ruby," the album's highlight, has an accessible pop elegance. Uplifting, oscillating ooh's lounge amid major key chordal melodies and equestrian drumming. Lyrics shine white-hot with a burning-magnesium bright light: "This baby's like a winter bird/ Raunchy and sweet/ With snowflakes melting in his hair/ The boys are supermen wondering..." Hersh's reputation and strength-- being off-kilter lyricwise and left-field musicwise-- almost feels like a nephew of a song rather than a child of her own. Ah, but there's a saving grace bridge that affords us a few moments of familiar University-ish unpredictability.

The few faults of Sunny Border Blue occur during the rare songs when Hersh goes on autopilot. Put the thumbscrews to me and I'd admit that "Summer Salt" sounds like so much filler. "Candyland" feels non-specific to the record and could have appeared innocuously on any of her solo efforts without seeming invasive. But in the long view, such sniping seems pretty lame when taken in the context of the disc's assets, which are nearly every song.

At this point in her Methuselan career, Hersh has no one left to surpass but herself. That can be challenging enough, given her tendency to meet and exceed expectations with alarming regularity. Anyone familiar with her entire corpus gets the sense that she'd have to work a hell of a lot harder to put out a bad album than a good one. The world is jealous.