Intimate, witty, and often kinda creepy, Corey Dargel's songs strike an uneasy balance between art and pop. Using some top-shelf musicians from New York's contemporary music scene and singing in a pop style (usually multitracked), Dargel spins quirky, lyrical tales of dysfunction and delusion. Someone Will Take Care of Me is a reassuring title for an album full of songs about people in desperate need of reassurance. In Thirteen Near-Death Experiences, the first of the album's two song cycles, Dargel is accompanied by ICE, the International Contemporary Ensemble, featuring drummer David T Little, for a series of skittering pop-inflected compositions. Imagine Franz Schubert composing a song cycle about hypochondria after listening to AM radio Top 40 and studying Thelonius Monk, and you might be prepared for "Twelve Year Old Scotch," or "Sometimes a Migraine Is Just a Migraine," or what I'm willing to bet is the first-ever art-song about Ritalin.

Even more unnervingly accessible is the second song cycle, Removable Parts, which takes a familiar love-song trope to its absurdist extreme. Old images of love hurting, blinding and tearing out one's heart are here turned into songs in which voluntary amputations are a metaphor for ways to deal with a… read more »