The Procession

Tamara Schlesinger sings with the British alt-pop group 6 Day Riot, and she also knows her way around a ukulele. On this solo outing, she deviates from her band’s quirky, peppery energy to a more subdued, neo-mystical one. Her soft, velvet-wrapped voice is the main feature here, double-tracked and overlaid and looped, accompanied by skeletal instrumentation like muted washes of guitar and glowing, hushed keyboard notes. Shakers hiss quietly, strings swoon as if under a gauzy linen shroud, and even the handclaps wouldn’t wake a sleeping watchdog. Schlesinger’s voice is a delight, just this side of woozy and utterly enchanting; it'd be a force to reckon with on another astral plane. In this world, she’d be flattened by the power of a Kate Bush or a Sharon Van Etten; but in another kinder and gentler place, she likely wears a queen’s crown of thornless roses. Her cascading notes on the delicate “I Go” and her birdlike trilling on “So Long” somehow carry as much force as her (comparatively) most robust moments, such as her from-the-gut vocalizing on the taut and shadowy “Can You See Me” and the tom-inflected, a cappella–inspired “Again.”