Ane Brun is already a star in her native Sweden, and should soon be one here as well -- this is perfect coffee-shop music, smooth and unobtrusive folk-pop with just enough unusual touches to save it from blandness. I can't quite get a handle on her voice, and at times she sounds like an insipid, insidiously jazz-inflected adult alternative chick singer, but more often there's something strange and appealing in her singing, especially in that pinched, almost freak-folky vibrato. "Song No. 6" is a self-described "sobby pink song about you," a sappy, charming duet with Ron Sexsmith who, liberated from the somewhat sheepish persona he inhabits in his solo material, turns in a surprisingly effective performance as a silky smooth lover man. Also, check out the spare, melancholy "Rubber & Soul" (oddly mislabeled here as "Song No. 6").
-- T.B
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