"Stop what you’re doin’/ ‘Cause I’m about to ruin/ The image and the style that you’re used to." That’s not how Edith Frost’s Telescopic kicks off; it’s the first line from the Digital Underground’s "Humpty Dance." But wouldn’t it be something to hear Frost get dirty on the mike?

Nah, instead of a Fear of a Black Planet for 1998, Frost has come down from her Chicago-y heaven to provide the world with a collection of sparkling pop trax and sentimental ballads. The rockin’ opener, "Walk On The Fire," is a subtly bluesy — and extremely catchy — chunk of indie pop. With its backwards guitar parts, amplified violins, lo-fi drumset and irresistible melody, the song sounds like the demon child of Liz Phair and the Olivia Tremor Control. And that’s just one of the 12 incredibly diverse tracks Telescopic has to offer.

But Frost veers off in multiple directions on this outing, her songs drawing comparisons to people like Patsy Cline ("The Very Earth"), fellow Chicagoans the Handsome Family ("Light," "You Belong To No One"), and early Neil Young ("Bluish Bells"). And looking at the "What’s On My Stereo" section of Edith’s website, it all becomes clear — her taste in music ranges from the dark experimentalism of Godspeed You Black Emperor and Laurie Anderson to self- loathing folk stuff like Elliott Smith and Lisa Germano.

Yeah, you’re probably going to read some reviews that lump Edith Frost in with modern folkies like Mary Lou Lord, Chan Marshall of Cat Power, Barbara Manning, Smog’s Bill Callahan, and the Silver Jews’ D.C. Berman — an insight that’s not entirely inaccurate. But Telescopic demonstrates Frost’s unique ability to add incredible depth to simple song structures. Take the sorrowful ballad "Tender Kiss" for example — all she really needed was an acoustic guitar and vocal part to nicely execute the track. Instead, she brought in a somewhat complicated Casio keyboard tango drum patch, a subtle vocal harmony, a flute of some kind, and a mourning violin. Sound overblown? Remarkably, the song remains sparse-sounding and beautiful.

So, even if we didn’t get the rap masterpiece we’ve been hoping for this year (let’s face it — that Pras record was just plain bad), we did get another great slice of well-produced contemporary folk-pop from Edith Frost and the folks down at Drag City Records. Predictable.

Call Edith Frost the crossover cowgirl, the alterna-country singer who discovered the fuzz pedal.  On Telescopic, her newest Drag City release, she treads the familiar lyrical ground of lost love (so confessional an artist that she has posted diary entries on her web site) but with unexpectedly psychedelic sonic textures, with not just guitar but violin, accordion and singing saw.^*  Her roots are as much in Royal Trux as in Hank and Patsy.  The reflectiveness isn’t diluted, however, by the added dimension.  Her music is so personal that this new genre she’s almost single-handedly invented doesn’t sound alien at all.

In Calling Over Time, Edith Frost and a crew of Drag City all-stars built a lovely, melancholic mood, with David (Gastr del Sol) Grubbs’ piano and organ inserting unsettling chords into low-key country arrangements.  But on Telescopic, Frost’s new Drag City release, a new cast of musicians gave her an almost prog-rock backing, while her vocals, so clear and cold on the first LP, are multi-tracked, burying their distinctive tone under studio frippery.  Looks like she’s building a career along the lines set out by labelmate Will Oldham, whose successive albums and tours are perversely inconsistent, marked by changing sidemen and changing arrangements for no clear purpose other than change itself.  Which is to say, who knows which Edith Frost will appear at this show?  She’s playing with Lullaby for the Working Class and Jana McCall, who went a bit Pink Floyd-y herself on her Up Records debut, so we could be in for the wrong kind of retro-’70s night.

Sat Feb 6 at the Breakroom.

Below Freezing
Edith Frost creates music that fits the season perfectly.

Chicago-based singer-songwriter Edith Frost designs corporate Web pages by day, and on her personal site (accessible at edithfrost.com), her expertise shows. A carefully organized guide to Frost’s discography, tour dates and press bites, the destination includes a gazillion links to locales ranging from the Schwa Corporation to the Stick Figure Death Theatre. Such connections are grouped into utilitarian rubrics such as “Timewasters,” a category that includes the subheadings "Artiness" and "Weirdness."

Many of the artists who’ve added breadth and texture to the guileless tunes Frost pens could fit neatly into the last two brackets.  The list of oddball luminaries who assisted this 33-year-old Texas native on her 1996 release Calling Over Time includes Gastr del Sol’s Jim O’Rourke and David Grubbs, Eleventh Dream Day’s Rick Rizzo, the High Llama’s Sean O’Hagan and Royal Trux’s Rian Murphy.  As for Telescopic, Frost’s most recent album, it bears the production imprint of Trux veterans Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema.  But despite all the high-profile names that have graced Frost’s liner notes, her compositions are possessed of a chilly grace that needs no padding.  They glow like radioactive skeletons that could have been assembled only by her.

According to Frost, the privilege of working with such pedigreed cohorts can be traced to the pivotal day four years ago when she mailed a demo tape from a post office in New York, where she was living at the time, to Drag City Records, home to Palace, the Silver Jews and other skewed simpletons with a crooked finger in folk and/or country.  Nine months later, worker ants at the modest yet esteemed Chicago label dug the cassette from the bottom of a review bin and were wowed enough to issue four of the tunes as a self-titled EP.  Drag City subsequently had no problem drafting players for Frost’s followup.

"It was Rian Murphy that set all that up," she says.  "He asked them if they wanted to make a record, and they all got tapes of the 25 songs that we were going to choose from for that record.  They got the tapes and did their homework.  We only had one rehearsal — the night before the session started."  She adds, "We recorded it in one week, but it doesn’t take long for guys like that to learn.  Basically, I’d just show them the song and they’d play something and ask, ‘Is that cool?’"

In the vast majority of cases, it was. Throughout the Calling Over Time sessions, the supporting musicians reined in their more eclectic impulses, deferring to the yearning simplicity of Frost’s melodies.  The piano and acoustic guitar on the recording form its forest floor, yet here and there, a violin or pedal steel hovers in a clearing — and on the delicate processional "Denied," shimmery waves of organ filter through the mix.

Frost dismisses the guitar chops she displays on other cuts as merely functional, but she’s a proficient enough player to have fronted three outfits in New York prior to her solo venture: Edith and Her Roadhouse Romeos, a rockabilly vehicle; the Holler Sisters, who covered Depression-era country acts; and the Marfa Lights, a country-swing band.  She admits that she didn’t traffic in the roots music of her home state until she moved to New York, whereupon she exploited her Texan-ness "to its full hilt.  When you live in Texas and you’re from Texas, it’s no big deal.  But the people that I met at work or wherever, that would be the first thing that they would think was cool about me.  ‘Oh, you’re from Texas?’ they’d say. ‘I like your accent!’"  The ploy has been equally effective in Chicago.  "I still ham it up with that I’m-from-Texas-and-where-we- come-from-blah-blah-blah bit," she notes.  "I’ve been using that joke for many years now, and I’m not going to quit.  It works just as well here as it does anywhere else."

The CDs Frost has generated for Drag City retain ghostly traces of her country past, which may explain why Jim O’Rourke purchased a pedal-steel guitar a few days before they were to enter the studio.  "That was his new toy," Frost recalls.  "I don’t know how he came across it, but it was totally perfect.  I said, ‘Let’s use it! Do you know how to play that thing?’  So he lays his hands on it and, of course, something totally beautiful comes out.  He basically brought that thing to the studio and set it up — and that was maybe the third time he had ever touched one."

On Telescopic, Frost’s associates weighed in with heavier hands and a more varied arsenal of schemes.  "In Calling Over Time, we had even more ideas than we were able to pull off during the six days that we were doing it," Frost says.  "So this time we were even more determined to get it all in there.  Neil [Hagerty], especially, had it really organized and efficient, so that we were able to do way more overdub and spend more time on all the textures."

One thing is certain: From the first song, which opens with a blast of fuzz that eventually leads to squiggling guitar licks, Telescopic is a much different creature than its quiet predecessor.  The dramatic sparsity of Frost’s earlier recordings has gone by the wayside, for even when she is playing the breathy Nick Drake maiden, lonely in her castle, a bowed upright bass heats the lower regions or an ambient hiss fills the emptiness.  Frost, however, views the thick, dust-storm feel of her latest as a natural progression.  "If you compare it to the EP that came out, which was something I did at home on the four-track by myself, Calling Over Time was a step beyond that in terms of adding instrumentation.  If we had made Telescopic back then, it would have seemed like complete chaos craziness.  But if you listen from one to the next, it makes sense."

Reproducing this sound sans her stellar contributors would seem to be a difficult proposition, especially since Frost goes on the road with only a rhythm section featuring bassist/ex-boyfriend Ryan Hembrey and drummer/percussionist Jason Adasiewicz.  But she doesn’t fear a leaner traveling cast in part because she’s currently touring with a band, Lullaby for the Working Class, from whose ranks she can draw.  "They’ve got, like, twenty people," she points out.  "I don’t know how many people they’re bringing, but I think at least six, so there will definitely be some monkey business as far as sitting in."

Frost’s mesmerizing vocals, meanwhile, will come at audiences straight and uncut, unlike those heard on Telescopic.  A smattering of numbers on Calling Over Time feature a single line augmented with wispy bits of harmonies in the chorus, but her latest sports "only one song that’s just one vocal," Frost claims.  "Everything else has total harmonies and double tracks and sometimes up to six or eight vocal things going on.  That was me just going hog wild.

"I play around with the vocals a lot, because it’s fun for me and that’s my instrument," she continues.  "If I’m going to mess with anything, that’s what I’m going to mess with.  Even on my own demos — when I do them on four-track, I usually double track it and add all these harmonies.  I’m really into harmonics, so a lot of my songs are plastered with harmonies.  I hear vocals with harmonies almost all the time.  If I hear something on the radio, I try to make up a harmony to it."

There’s a haunting familiarity about Frost’s pipes; her singing seems to have drifted into the present from a distant place and time.  Critics have likened her to crooners such as Patsy Cline, Hank Williams and Neil Young, but she thinks other comparisons are more apt.  "The first group I ever got into when I was a kid was the Carpenters, so perhaps that was an influence," she suggests.  But in her opinion, "I sound a lot like Skeeter Davis."

That Frost should make a reference to a Grand Ole Opry star from the Fifties and Sixties is predictable: She has an impressive collection of what she calls "antique-music country and old timey music."  But she’s had to forgo building it up of late.  "I have too many records now," she says.  "My apartment is so small — the one I’m living in now — and I already had to get rid of one big-ass bookshelf, and I got rid of four bookshelves when I moved from New York to Chicago.  So I’m down to one big one now, and it’s completely stuffed.  It’s twelve feet of records, so I can’t pursue that hobby like I used to."

Still, Frost’s knowledge of the form made her a natural for inclusion on a recent tribute to swing-king Bob Wills credited to the Pine Valley Cosmonauts, a project overseen by the Mekons’ Jon Langford.  But while she has enjoyed the experience of collaborating with Langford and others from Chicago’s indie pool, she’s looking forward to forming fresh alliances for upcoming projects.  "I’d like to work with some of the same people again and new people, both.  I’ve made such great musical relationships with people that I really want to keep that going."

In a town that boasts as many stimulating musicians as Frost’s Web site has links, that shouldn’t be a problem.

Edith Frost, with Lullaby for the Working Class. 9 p.m. Wednesday, February 10, 15th Street Tavern, 623 15th Street, $6, 303-572-0822.

One listen to Edith Frost’s latest album, Telescopic (Drag City), makes it obvious why the label turned a demo she sent them in 1994 into an EP almost immediately.  Despite her affiliation with one of the hippest indie labels, Frost lacks pretension.  Like labelmate Will Oldham, Frost draws on traditions of country and folk, incorporating them into her own quirky style to great effect.  Frost’s recorded vocals are more akin to a smoother Liz Phair than to Billie Holiday, with whom she has been compared.  Perhaps it’s due to the electric (and often ethereal) approach on her albums, thanks in part to recording help from Chicago contemporaries Jim O’Rourke and David Grubbs of Gastr del Sol and Tsunami’s Amy Domingues.  The live version is more sparse.  Frost conveys beauty and genuine longing in heartfelt — but never clichéd — tunes with surprising ease.  Lucky for us, she’s finally touring out West.

Edith Frost: Getting Warmer

"I’ve been saying it from day one and I’m still saying it: I just don’t want to ever have anything to do with the big corporate music scene."

Edith Frost is an unusual, low-key neo-folk artist known for stark, chilly songs that possess an honesty and directness which somehow makes their aloofness endearing.  A bare-bones, self-titled EP from 1996 introduced Frost’s unique talents, and her full-length followup, 1997′s Calling Over Time, featured such guests as Sean O’Hagan from the High Llamas, as well as an almost Nick Drake-like melancholy.  The new, country-tinged Telescopic is more musically lush and slightly more upbeat, albeit with Frost’s trademark poor-me lyrics.  Frost recently spoke to The Onion about depression, Jewel, high school, and her cat.

The Onion: What were you doing before the first record came out?

Edith Frost: I’ve been writing songs off and on since I was 19.  I lived in Texas most of my life until I moved to New York in 1990.  I started playing, fooling around doing country tunes on my guitar, just trying to sing and play at the same time.  I did that at this open mic, doing cover tunes and old-time country stuff, and then I started playing in bands.  The open mic thing evolved into a country swing band called the Marfa Lights, and I also joined a rockabilly band called the Roadhouse Romeos.  I was writing as much as I could and sending a few tapes out to record labels.  This friend was egging me on; he told me to send one to Drag City, and I did.

O: Is that how you ended up in Chicago?

EF: Yeah.  I had moved from New York, where I had just broken up with my husband — my ex-husband now — and it was just really weird for me there.  Moving to Chicago was great.  It was a fresh start.  It’s great to live there, other than the snow.

O: It’s taken you quite a while to get a cross-country tour going.

EF: Well, I didn’t have a van at first.  The first tour, I was just learning how to tour.  In order to come out this way, you have to do it right.  I kept wanting to do these tours that were only one week long, and you can’t do that.  I must have toured five or six times, getting a little bit longer each time, stretching out a little more, and I finally got a van last year.  On the first tour I did, I rented a van, and it was a disaster for my credit card.  I knew I couldn’t do that again.

O: You don’t like being away from home for very long?

EF: It was all these little things, like "Is my cat being taken care of?"  I just didn’t feel like I could go out for that long.  This is the longest tour I’ve even done — and I’m like "Ohmigod!"  I like it, but I miss my boyfriend a lot, and I miss my cat.  I miss being home, ’cause I’m pretty much a homebody.  But I love traveling.  I love looking out the window.

O: Your first records had a very sparse, empty sound, but on Telescopic you really let the country feel flourish, with lots of different instruments.

EF: I think Telescopic is more densely arranged, but I came into both projects with a bunch of songs, not really considering them country or any other genre or anything.  It’s just the way they turned out.  Calling Over Time had shades of country, some pedal-steel guitar and stuff, but Telescopic is just more so in every regard.  With Calling Over Time, we just wanted to do the songs as best we could in the time we had, and we had to get 12 songs done in just six days.  We just recorded it and did overdubs and did as much as we could.  At the time, compared to the EP, it was pretty dense — anyway, there were more instruments.  So we thought, we’d better leave it this way.  We didn’t have any more time, anyway.

O: You’re playing in mostly punk-type venues, but your music isn’t very punk at all.

EF: I used to listen, I mean, I still listen to punk.  I was a punk in high school and in my early college years, so I come from that somewhat myself.  I don’t know that if you listen to the music, you can really hear that.  I don’t think so.  But in spirit, yes.

O: Are you glad that you’re on a small indie label, and you don’t have to worry about the pressures of selling tons of records, like some of your peers?

EF: Yeah.  I see it, and I’m dismayed.  I’ve been saying it from day one and I’m still saying it: I just don’t want to ever have anything to do with the big corporate music scene.  I have a real wariness about that, because they just want to spend your money.  Whereas a label like Drag City is tight with money, and they’re really smart.  I trust them with my money.  They’re not going to do anything stupid.

O: How about the record-buying public?  Do you ever think people are stupid for buying Jewel’s records instead of yours?

EF: Oh, no.  No.  There’s got to be a mainstream.  I don’t want to be in the mainstream, I don’t want to be marketed like that, I don’t want to be a product like that.  Somebody else has to do it.  So, it’s great that somebody like Jewel can do that so I don’t have to, you know?  There’s always got to be something bad — I don’t think Jewel is bad, I don’t — but, like, lame radio, you know?  There’s a place for that, so you know what’s good.  It makes it really obvious so you can tell the difference.

O: Have people remarked that your music is sad or cold or depressing?

EF: Well, a lot of the songs are totally sad and cold and depressing!  But the thing that sometimes bugs me is that people will write about me and think that I am that way, that I’m a sad person, or that I’m depressed.  Poor Edith, you know, she got her heart broken so bad.  But it’s not really that bad. [Laughs.]  I mean, I write it and I get it over with.  When I talk to people, I’m not normally depressed.  I put it into music and let it go.  It makes me feel weird when people are feeling sorry for me because of my music.  Because it’s really not a problem for me.

Edith Frost plays the 15th St. Tavern on Feb. 10 at 10 p.m.  Lullaby For The Working Class and The Foggy Mountain Fuckers will open the show.

With her forbidding, Victorian-sounding name and haunting songs, it’s tempting to romanticize Drag City songstress Edith Frost as some sort of distant, enigmatic poet; yet a visit to her homemade webpage reveals a warm, disarming person who really wants to share her songs with the public. Regardless of her ersonality, she continues to weave an enchanting musical tapestry with her latest album, Telescopic.

Frost’s debut full-length Calling Over Time was a real find, a captivating and austere distillation of American folk that conjured up the lonely, wastelands of some mythical Midwest. Telescopic’s opening track, "Walk on the Fire," signals a somewhat different affair, as it begins in a glorious racket of abrasive guitar, crashing drums and rumbling bass. But, lo and behold, here come the same somewhat-fragile, ethereal vocals rolling above the fray. Telescopic is a fuller-sounding recording to be sure, but it’s hardly over-produced. And in a way, the clanging guitar lines, scraping cellos and sharp cymbals convey a similar harshness as the skeletal arrangements of her first record.

At first listen, the album seems like a paler retread of Calling Over Time, somewhat scarce on tunes. But once you adjust to Frost’s measured pace, the melodies start to sink in. Frost sings mostly love songs, though not usually cheery ones. She summed up her philosophy on her first album when she sang, "I don’t wanna be too happy/Just enough to keep me goin’."

Frost gets a lot of mileage out of the simplest of songs as with the spacey title track and "On Hold," which makes do without a chorus and hardly any verse. The seductive "Walk on the Fire" reveals a new toughness, while the rollicking "Bluish Bells" and "My Capture" ("I’m a hungry tiger in a kitten suit") get more than a bit playful. The producers, Adam and Eve, cloak Frost’s compositions in suitable instrumental attire, especially the mournful violin on the loverlorn "Tender Kiss."

Edith Frost, Lullaby for the Working Class, Knife in the Water
Emo’s, Saturday 23

Rooted somewhere in the Midwest, there’s a vast family tree growing from the mulch of Nineties indie rock.  Its branches are surnamed experimental, post-rock, shoegazer, and otherwise pruned-down sparse-rock too young to be named, composed of the members of Tortoise, Gastr del Sol, Palace, and a gazillion others.  Recently alit on its gnarled, inbred branches is Chicago songbird Edith Frost, who can’t believe how her former nest of Austin, which she left early this decade, has grown.  Her openness and excitement about this and every topic belies the often turbid waters of her musical gene pool.

"It blows my mind every time I go back because the landmarks are different."  She gets nostalgic, angry even, over the passing of downtown’s neon Terminix bug, and Club Foot, then catches herself, lest she sound too old-fogeyish.  "But there’s some things that never change — like Toy Joy.  You can’t go home again, really.  Austin’s gotten so huge."

Frost and posse galloped through Emo’s last year for an intimate Mother’s Day gig (with proud Mama Frost in the audience), her subtly sweet, never-saccharine vocals blowing over the stark, wintry soundscapes, convincing you she means every word of her high-lonesome songs.  In fact, with 1997′s Calling Over Time, backed by the Drag City supergroup of David Grubbs, Jim O’Rourke, and others, and last October’s release of the warmer, noisier Telescopic, that Frosty voice is becoming more and more in demand among her cross-pollinating contemporaries, evidenced by an ever-growing list of collaborations including Songs:Ohia, the Willard Grant Conspiracy, Archer Prewitt (Coctails, the Sea and Cake), the Pine Valley Cosmonauts, and the Boxhead Ensemble.

"I really love helping people out that way; it’s so much fun and so rewarding," gushes Frost when asked about her burgeoning résumé.  "People find out about you who wouldn’t have otherwise.  I don’t really have to do anything but show up and sing, and I get all these props for it, not money-wise — at all — but the feeling, ‘Yes.  I’m so psyched I got to be a part of that.’"

Fleshing out her delicate folk-pop with hints of electronic atmosphere, Frost is Chicago’s answer to Beth Orton and Lida Husik.  She sings carefully chosen words about broken relationships in a dreamy voice, leaving clean incisions that may require stitches weeks after they’re first heard.

Hazy, narcotic-hued soundscapes abound on Telescopic, Edith Frost’s second album, which broadens the former Texan’s frugal acoustic approach with a medley of humming and buzzing electric instruments.  Though the album’s lethargic pace initially lulls the listener, Frost’s dreamlike musings of human frailties are melodic, distinctive, and wholly addictive.

Critics lined up to praise Calling Over Time, singer/songwriter Edith Frost’s star-studded 1997 debut.  Thus were hopes high for the follow-up from this "country-Midwestern" queen.  And Frost doesn’t disappoint.  With co-conspirators Ryan Hembrey (Pinetop Seven), Amy Domingues (Tsunami), Rian Murphy (Royal Trux) and others, Telescopic is as good a slice as you’ll savor this year.  Frost’s low, confident voice lies somewhere between Bliss Blood’s and Liz Phair’s, and on Calling Over Time, her guitar and vocals often tumble into minor keys and themes.  With Telescopic, though, the melancholy oeuvre is balanced with poetic metaphor and savvy philosophy, resulting in an immensely personal journey by an artist who feels and understands much around her.  On "Falling," Frost invites her lover to plunge with her, explaining, "The pleasure is worth the fear."  The title track examines the inequality between what we receive from the heavens (starlight, dreams, inspiration) and the white noise we pump into them.  Sonically, Frost melts strings and occasional electronica into her folk; her band sounds live and organic.  The result — innovative music paired with meaningful lyrics and strong songwriting style — is celestial.

If Patsy Cline had lived longer, it wouldn’t be difficult to imagine her today, trading nights of sumptuous standards with Bobby Short at New York’s elegant Carlyle Hotel.  As recently released live recordings of Cline have revealed, despite her hard life and hard living, she was less a hardcore honkytonk gal than a wondrous pop stylist.

Chicago chanteuse Edith Frost gets colored with the country brush as well, and the sad songs and influx of steel guitar on her gorgeous new album Telescopic (Drag City) probably won’t help dispel such typecasting.

"I like it when people compare me to freaks like Syd Barrett," says Frost, sipping coffee at New York’s hipster haven Limbo.  "There’s a lot of elements I want to put into my music that can’t be summed up by saying ‘country.’  I love it, but I’m not trying to make a straight-up country record, or any kind of record at all.  I don’t want to be able to peg it to any one genre.  I mean, the first band I ever flipped out over was the Carpenters.  I kind of dig those cheesy layered vocals."

Where Frost single-tracked her vocals on her sparse, sorrowful debut, Calling Over Time, Telescopic dresses up her dew-eyed, downbeat songs, and luxuriates with harmonies and beautifully simple vocal melodies.

"We spent the same amount of time making it — six days — but we just had a different approach this time," she says.  "We couldn’t make another record that was more stark.  I wanted to do something full-on.  Also, we were recording it with a different combination of people, and we weren’t in Chicago."

Instead, Frost and her band sequestered themselves in Warrenton, Virginia, about an hour outside Washington, DC, home to elusive producers Adam and Eve — actually Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema of Royal Trux — and really concentrated on the songs.  The solitude was necessary after the last album.  Frost had just moved from Brooklyn to Chicago then, to start over after a difficult divorce.  Time has eased her pain somewhat, judging by her new songs.  There are more tunes about moving on and forgiveness here, even playful tunes like "Bluish Bells" and the warily hopeful "Falling." Still, it’s the saddest songs that seem closest to Frost’s heart, the beautifully chilling ones pulled from real pain.

"I want to pick at the scabs, and most people don’t like to do that," she says.  "But writing is hard.  I just try to get it as best I can.  A lot of them seem transparently simple to me.  I read other people’s lyrics that are so out there, and take you to a whole other dimension.  They can take themselves out of their own experience and write these crazy, cool things.  I’d love to do that — if I could just do some exercises to channel some more writerly writer than myself."

On her second album, produced by Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema of Royal Trux, Edith Frost has replaced the acoustic gentility of her previous recordings with electric gentility, her rootsy melancholia with fuzzed-out psychedelia. But her beautifully understated serpentine melodies remain a constant, and the backup — Rian Murphy, Ryan Hembrey, Amy Domingues, Jean Cook, and Jason Quick, on drums, bass, guitar, and a lot of violin — still caresses her siren’s croon rather than shaping it. Although it would be nice to hear her try a tempo other than mid, Frost obviously has that rare desire to transform herself from within and the even rarer ability to pull it off.

Some of 1998′s best albums have been made by indie-rockers lifting a glass to the end of irony.  Call it a longing for honest emotion, for music that’s simply beautiful and emotionally moving.  Indeed, powerful albums this year from Cat Power, Elliott Smith, David Gedge’s Cinerama, Mike Johnson and Richard Davies, not to mention the Elvis Costello – Burt Bacharach collaboration, may someday make the late ’90s seem as halcyon an era for sophisticated singer-songwriter stylings as the early ’70s seem, retrospectively, with Nick Drake, Tim Buckley, Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen.  Add another name to that list, as well — country-tinged Chicago chanteuse Edith Frost, whose second full-length, Telescopic, far surpasses her first-rate debut, Calling Over Time.

Fleshed out from the skeletal fragments of Frost’s first songs with a broader palette of instruments and a breathtaking late-night intimacy, Telescopic is simply stunning.  Cat Power’s Moon Pix might be more chilling, but Frost is positively heart-stilling, her voice tender and true, her melodies evocative and pure.  When she sings, "You’ll be putting my heart on hold," dropping down and fashioning a three-syllable hook out of "heart," she has the emotional intuition of Patsy Cline.  "You can be lonely with someone you trust," she sings in "You Belong To No One," with a deceptive airiness that belies that she probably knows this all too well.  "Bluish Bells" makes its impact with fuzzy bridges connecting ringing verses, Frost calling, simply, "Come running with me darlin’ / I miss your fire." Telescopic is an album of such passion, beauty and grace that it seems certain to become an honored standard.  Don’t wait decades to discover its majesty.