(Drag City)

www.dragcity.com

Calcination, if you're not a chemistry whiz, means heating substances to just below their melting point, in order to flush out impurities. It's hard to imagine Scout Niblett, the British-born, grunge-influenced songwriter having any impurities left after the searing, disintegrating processes hinted at in this, her fifth full-length album. "Welcome...to my self-made sweatbox," she murmurs in the title track, the snaky blues melody sung in a voice that is nearly supine with exhaustion, yet ready to break into a defiant, triumphant wail. Struggle, strength, despair and triumph vie for supremacy in these bare tunes. The album seems, at times, like a form of primal scream therapy.

Niblett worked again with Steve Albini for Calcination, and he manages to surround even the loudest cuts with three-dimensional silence. From this deep well of sonic spaces, she jolts and confronts with just voice, drums and electric guitar. Her singing is raw, slurred with blues slides, often quiet but prone to electric crescendos that come out of nowhere. Her guitar playing, though, is what separates this album from the common run of blues folk revivalists. On the one hand, she plays sparsely, sparely, with simple riffs that leave ample space for reflection. On the other hand, her guitar can turn astonishingly loud and distorted and rock. The solo that closes out "Cherry Cheek Bomb" has the weight of Led Zeppelin, the untethered aggression of Bleach-era Nirvana. As on previous albums, she also plays drums in battering, off-kilter flourishes that are more catharsis than rhythmic underpinning.

The songs on Calcination are deceptively simple sounding, constructed out of repetitive, minimal melodic lines and impressionistic images, but that simplicity is where they get their power. "Lucy Lucifer", accompanied just with drums, has the primitive clarity of a hex laid down by firelight, while the wonderfully uneasy "I.B.D." follows a thread of Appalachian picking through the darkest thickets of self-doubt. There's something ritual about these songs, an aura of hard, necessary healing through pain. It's not an easy listen, but Calcination will stay with you for a long time.

Standout Tracks: "The Calcination of Scout Niblett", "I.B.D.", "Cherry Cheek Bomb" JENNIFER KELLY