Julie Doiron

Julie Doiron follows up last summer’s French album, Desormais, with this intimate effort that fans will embrace like a favourite plushy. Familiar like a blanket that smells of a loved one, Doiron delivers a dozen exercises in heartbreak, love and loss, and of course her whispery close nose-and-throat vocals. Accompanied most sparsely since her earliest work as Broken Girl, she goes this one largely alone, occasionally accompanied by a little background shuffle of harmonica and percussion by Dale Morningstar (who recorded this at his Gas Station studio on Toronto Island). Island birds get into the act on "I Broke His Heart,” somehow heightening the sense of solitude. Where her earlier album, Loneliest In the Morning, felt like stolen time away from a busy world, Heart and Crime sounds truly solo. Enjoy it while you can, since Doiron claims to be taking an extended break after a very busy last couple of years.