Goners on CD

Goners, the fifth album from acclaimed singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Laura Gibson, is her best, and also her strangest. There are hauntings and transformation, odd birds and harbingers. Women become wolves, men metamorphose into machines, ghost-children wave in the rearview mirror, a scar becomes a vessel for memory. Her lyrics are populated with sharp objects: a needle, a thistle, a sickle, a scythe, claws and animal teeth. "I wanted the songs to feel like fables, to unfold with dream logic," Gibson explains. Goners is a record for thinkers and feelers, for the fierce and also the weary, and despite it's darkness, Gibson has succeeded in making a work of radical hope.