None More Than You

My Brightest Diamond's first release since the 2011 collaboration with the yMusic chamber ensemble, All Things Will Unwind, the None More Than You EP offers a glimpse of her fifth full-length, This Is My Hand. Shara Worden returns with more of the equally ethereal and cerebral music that earned praise for Bring Me the Workhorse and A Thousand Shark's Teeth, albeit with a few tweaks. Inspired by Top 40 hits as well as her time performing in Matthew Barney's film The River of Fundament and scoring Buster Keaton's The Ballonatic, this is some of her most direct music. She delivers vivid synth pop augmented with harp and woodwinds on the charming "Whoever You Are," the EP's most immediate track. Elsewhere, she proves that a more streamlined My Brightest Diamond still has lots of levels and tangents with two wildly different mixes of "Dreaming Awake." Son Lux's interpretation is dense and beat-driven, giving a claustrophobic edge to lyrics like "I could stay here always/Just watching you breathe," while Mason Jar Music's version emphasizes the song's intertwining brass, giving the impression of an avant-garde New Orleans jazz funeral (that the album version of "Dreaming Awake" is nowhere to be found only adds to the intrigue). The EP's quieter moments — the wintry ballad "Dreams Don't Look Like" and the gentle finale "That Point When" — are more like My Brightest Diamond's previous output, but no less lovely for that. All in all, None More Than You is a tantalizing peek at what This Is My Hand has to offer, and reinforces the feeling that anything might be possible with Worden's return.