Her Space Holiday

Singer-songwriter-multi-instrumentalist Marc Bianchi has announced that this sixth full-length album (in 15 years) will be his last under the project name Her Space Holiday. Not that he's quitting music, mind, but that this particular project has run its course. And listening to the self-titled album, it's not hard to understand why he feels that way: these 10 songs are in all ways a departure from the moody electropop that was Her Space Holiday's initial stock in trade. Even more so than 2008's largely acoustic and folk-influenced XOXO, Panda and the New Kid Revival, this album is a near-total depature both lyrically and sonically. Musically, the album is defined by its strings and horns, giving it a sound pitched somewhere between the self-conscious epic grandeur of Arcade Fire and the restless experimentalism of late-'90s Elephant 6ers like Olivia Tremor Control and Neutral Milk Hotel. Lyrically, songs like the rattling opener "Anything For Progress" and the novelistic waltz-time closer "In the Time It Takes For The Lights To Change," evince a newfound emotional openness; not optimism, exactly, but a willingness to accept that happiness is a valid option. It's a good note to go out on, even if Bianchi's tongue-in-cheek joke of a label name suggests otherwise.