Headline: "The Wonderful Things She Does"

One subtext of Jennifer Terran's wonderfully lovely, weird, and engaging new album has to do with sweet revenge. The tune called "Mad Magdaline" is a pretty little murder fantasy of the "indie artist as warrior" sort. Ironically, her anti-corporate rhetoric is a moot because Terran continues to prove that music is about the music-making, by whatever means necessary.

She has shown self-generating moxie on her previous albums, "Cruel" and the EP "Rabbit", but "The Musician"- constructed over two years- is, we're informed, "produced, written, engineered, mixed and mastered" by JT. She plunged into the DIY revolution, downloading feverishly and spilling her guts onto hard drives (a self-referential sort, she includes an ode to the technical data of the project, including an appreciation for local custom gadget guru "Stain" McClain.).

One refreshing thing here is the lack of guitars or digital/sampled sounds in the palette: Her songs are usually based on piano vamps, with buzzing background vocals and string textures (double bassist Brendan Statom, cellist Misha Bodnar, violinists Laura Hextine and Sally Barr among the guest) slathered lovingly on the music.

She sings with confidence, but also with a vulnerability that matches the paradox of sweetness and bite in her lyrics. It opens ethereally, with the wistful reflection of "Liberty Lunch," with an Annette Peacock-like enigma. "Sweet love" is an undulant, Lennon-esque 6/8 tune, and somehow Lennon's ghost returns on the closing tune, "Magdaline Try," with its haunting, deceptive simplicity and thickly layered voice beds.

Call this music art-pop if you call it anything, but elements of chamber music and performance art ooze in as well. Her melodies often take meandering, serpentine paths, and she might take a surprisingly jazzy harmonic turn at times. But the music is also winning and emotional, never too heady. In other words, this music is hard to explain away by the usual descriptors, which is all for the good. More info: jenniferterran.com