Dieu Deuil is warmth. It's walking inside out of the rain, drying off and sipping hot chocolate. It's here to help, not hurt you. The delicate, slow fade-in of "November Tree" that opens the album promises hospitality and the soothing comforts of elegantly executed musical beauty. Your mind immediately floods with images of quaint rural cottages, softly glowing lighthouses and verdant pine copses -- oh wait, sorry, my eyes just drifted to my giant wall of Thomas Kinkades. Dieu Deuil is indeed full of calming, warm bath-like tones and textures, but like Tanakh's last album, it's too eclectic and inconspicuously dark to invite Body Shop store music comparisons.

Tanakh is the name given to Jesse Poe and the rotating roster of musicians who collaborate with him on each release. Previously based in Virginia, Poe now calls Florence, Italy home, which hints at his music's global reach. He has largely curbed the North Indian and Middle Eastern elements that saturated 2001's accomplished Villa Claustrophobia, but a combination of disparate styles like English folk, "weird" Americana and bombastic Canadian post-rock remain. Dieu Deuil's sharper focus makes it less pleasantly surprising than its predecessor, but it's just as immersive.

With their mixture of improvised and written passages, and song lengths that typically stretch past the six minute mark, Tanakh are obviously in no kind of hurry. No fewer than twelve musicians, armed with guitars, glockenspiels, dulcimers, flutes and violins, achieve a sound that begs for the overused descriptor "lush". During the album's several sprawling instrumental segments, it's Dan Calhoune's aching violin that really gives these songs their emotional lift and aligns Tanakh with the member-sharing Chicago microscene that includes Boxhead Ensemble, Pinetop Seven and Sinister Luck Ensemble. Often, as on "Instrumental", Calhoune's double-tracked strings help the band sound like a slightly cleaner Dirty Three (whose Jim White plays on the disc).

When Poe opens his mouth, Tanakh's success rate is less surefire. He's usually at least adequate, and often he's perfect, as on the haunting "Lady Eucharist". Like Villa Claustrophobia's "Gently Johnny", its dainty, Tim Buckley-like acoustic guitar sits you barefoot next to a running stream with a straw stem in your mouth while sneaking up behind you with lyrical entendres like, "Lady Eucharist, put you in my mouth...all my dreams turn to flesh". Whenever Michele Poulos joins Poe on vocals, the results are uniformly gorgeous, reaching a bare emotional peak on "'Til San Francisco" ("I will sing to you forever 'till forever subsides / I will lay by you forever dreaming side by side"). This bareness is double-edged, though; Poe lets slide mawkish misfires like "come into my cocoon / let me wrap you in my love" and "my soul's fleshlocked on this killing floor".

Dieu Deuil may be flawed, but Poe and his battalion of players seem too talented and in-tune to make anything that's infrequently captivating. Lacking an easily identifiable region or genre, Tanakh's sound is as hard to classify as it is easy to love.