New Recordings

Pop

Jesca Hoop's life story, like her second album, is full of disparate paths. A childhood of singing folk songs in a Mormon family, cross-country travels with Deadheads, nanny to Tom Waits' family: there's no obvious coherence there. Nor is there one to Hunting My Dress, unless it's the restless, adventurous spirit that infuses the songs.

"Tulip," a murder ballad, conjoins a melody indebted to old English folk songs with a buzzy electronic throb. The perky "Four Dreams" features clipped, leaping syllables. "Feast of the Heart" is dark and distorted. "Murder of Birds," with harmonies from Elbow's Guy Garvey, is a Joanna Newsom-like ballad. In foregrounding eccentricities and fearlessly following divergent, artful muses, Hoop pays homage to Kate Bush, Björk, and Sinead O'Connor. But while Hunting My Dress has impressive emotional and aesthetic breadth, it's disorienting.

- Steve Klinge

Crazy for You
(Mexican Summer ***)

Bethany Cosentino's slacker-Ronettes trio Best Coast has released Internet-acclaimed singles since 2009. But it's the songs you don't already know on the full-length debut Crazy for You that will surprise you ("The End" is classic That Dog, if that means anything to other '90s-nostalgia hoarders). As slyly catchy as Cosentino's one- and two-minute songs are, they're closer to sad, classic country than pop. Four unbearably desolate lines in "Goodbye" update Lucinda Williams' hyper-romantic blues for the new Great Depression: "I miss my mom / I wish my cat could talk / Every time you leave this house / Everything falls apart." True, no one's ever saved rock-and-roll with love songs. Maybe the ones in which she complains about boys stealing her weed and apologizes for being a brat.

- Dan Weiss

The Laziest Gal in Town
(DRG ***)