***EMILY JANE WHITE’s third album is her most realized work to date. Drawing upon finger-picked folk, traditional country, classical music, and rock, White creates an expansive space for her intuitive lyrics and elegiac vocals. The spare skeletons of the songs are fleshed out with subdued electric guitar thrums, diaphanous organ, ethereal pedal steel guitar, lush strings, and White’s dusky alto with its signature catch. There’s a rare confidence to White’s songwriting; it’s at once generous and tough-minded, reflective and unsentimental. Her work shares some elements with folk music, but the term does not do justice to her ambitious songwriting and robust arrangements. White possesses a singular voice inspired by the raveled threads of the uncanny in American culture, including depression-era blues and classic works of gothic literature such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper. (STREET DATE - 6/12/2012)