Eleni Mandell, Artificial Fire

Never mind the artifice, here's Eleni Mandell, with feeling. The coolly brilliant Los Angeles chanteuse packs some serious heat, thanks in part to guitarist Jeremy Drake, who squeezes out the sparks that make the 15 songs on "Artificial Fire" roar and flicker. Not since Johnny Marr hooked up with Morrissey has a guitarist so effectively fleshed out a singer-songwriter's most candid emotions. On the opening title song, Drake snaps out a volley of notes underlining Mandell's motive for a seduction in Montreal: "I'm a killer at heart and I wanted to feel."

Do you hear that, Eleni Nation? Once a master of the languorous pose, whether as the hovering angel L.A. bohemia in her 1999 debut Wishbone, or poised purveyor of noir twang in 2003's Country for True Lovers (k.d. lang as she might have been imagined by the Coen Bros), or on the original cabaret tunes that revealed the rich character of an old soul in 2007's Miracle of Five, on this one, Mandell lets her heart speak and body rock. "I want to feel good, I want to feel right," she sings in "God is Love," a song with enough sex and spirituality to make Madonna levitate.

"Personal" is part personal ad, part confession, a lovely string arrangement by Drake abating the loneliness as Mandell sings, "I need to feel…"; pausing for a beat, she adds, "hopeful." Mandell is capable of breaking your heart with poignant childhood memories, singing about her mother in a yellow dress, "dad in his red Pendleton shirt" in "It Wasn't the Time (It was the Color)," and still, revealing her feeling: "I felt so forgettable." On the other hand, there's plenty of sex in the city, whatever city Mandell happens to be in, on the swinging and satisfied "Right Side," on the furtive and intoxicating "In the Doorway," and in the finest three minutes she's ever recorded, a romp called "Bigger Burn" which rollicks and rolls like it jumped out of Meet the Beatles, Drake firing off a jubiliant, compressed solo like George Harrison on "I Saw Her Standing There." The later songs on this rich 15-tune collection take on different '60s shades, from the girl-group sound of "Don't Let It Happen" (Inara George, harmony vocals), from which Mandell strips the naivete, to the brilliant Grace Slick stance on "Needle and Thread," on which Drake and bassist Ryan Feves and drummer Kevin Fitzgerald manage to approximate the Jorma Kaukonen/Jack Casady/Spencer Dryden core of Jefferson Airplane. Closing tune "Cracked" makes explicit Mandell's affinity for X and the historic L.A. punk scene, with which she identifies but rarely embodies. This time she does, and why not? Drummer Fitzgerald even gets to bash like he does when he tours with the current version of the Circle Jerks.