Jolie Holland should be redundant: Her fetish for country’s cobwebby corners postdates Neko Case, her mangled vowels and husky torment recall Cat Power’s Chan Marshall and her tales of corrupted innocence follow in Lucinda Williams’s sizable wake. Does anyone need another vocally mannered, boho-soul chick with a lust for the dark side? But Holland’s fourth album—far and away her strongest—is flawlessly executed and fearlessly told. In “Mexico City,” scratched acoustic guitar and a half-century-old backbeat evoke a netherworld between love and remorse, hallucination and grim reality: “Jack and Edie, laying across my bed/Flying high, like the spirits of the dead.” “Palmyra” is a requiem for New Orleans and the sins Holland committed there. Retro-atmospherics guru M. Ward and grizzled guitar genius Marc Ribot leave their dusty fingerprints. Holland leaves behind a trail of her own.

DOWNLOAD “Mexico City,” “Sweet Loving Man,” “You Painted Yourself In”