Finds You In Love

Finds You in Love is Jen Wood's first album in eight years, since 2002's Traveling Through Roots, and one might think she has spent the ensuing time undergoing treatment for clinical depression. If so, she may be off her meds here (as she suggests on the opening track, "Pills"), since she sounds much of the time like she's just working herself up to a romantic commitment to the "you" addressed in the lyrics, albeit without much energy or conviction. Repeatedly, but unconvincingly, claiming that things are, or will be, "all right," she seems more believable when, after bringing up suicide in "People Like Us," she decides that people like her "survive." Appropriately, the songs are taken at slow, deliberate tempos with quiet arrangements that sometimes subside into near-ambience, and Wood sings in a calm, listless voice that combines Suzanne Vega's controlled articulation with Björk's breathy, disembodied quality (though without Björk's Icelandic accent, of course). Often, she seems to be in transit, riding in a car or on a long flight, and that seems a metaphorical statement of her view of life, as a dull, timeless passage to be endured, but at least in the company of a fellow traveler.