A Negative Capability showcases Elisabeth Wood's soft soprano. She sounds like Chan Marshall or Sinéad O'Connor, albeit without the force that O'Connor generally puts behind her phrasing. Wood's tone and tempo are always gentle and meditative, matching her lyrics. Thoughtful, witty and cerebral, she measures love and loss with a really long yardstick; the emotional events she's singing about may have happened to her -- at least some of them -- but she's managed to distance herself from them. If it is possible for a human being to sound arch and dreamy at the same time, then Wood is a master of that emotional juxtaposition.

Wood's lyrics are like fairy tales told by Angela Carter or Robert Coover: literate, richly painted and occasionally bloody. "Love is Meat" is a prime example of this aesthetic: "Love is a chicken breast, large and smooth and wide and awkward", and later, "Love says you must sit down and taste my meat". The song gives you the feeling that Cook has been reading the Norwegian and Irish folk source material for King Lear, and it makes the hairs on the back of your neck prickle. If it sounds as though I'm trying to be particularly erudite when referring to Fancie, that's because Cook's aesthetic is informed by erudition: she sings in a Latin mass choir. In "Punkin" she swirls together the images of a carved, hollowed pumpkin and a diminutive name for sweethearts, and concludes in her chorus that "emptiness will make us flicker". Oddly enough, however, her sound is always happy and golden, much in the same way that a sunset signifies a dying day, yet has an undeniably sweet draw.

If I had one suggestion for Wood as a performer, it's that she should enunciate a bit more crisply. Even when Björk is engaging in her most Bobcat Goldthwaite-like growls, it is possible to hear every syllable of every word she's singing. I have read that Wood deliberately sung in a lower register than her natural pitch, and this may have been the cause of some of her less comprehensible moments. Wood's lyrics are so original that I hate to miss any of them, and if that lower register is going to become a permanent practice, then I'm sure that with time she'll discover more ways to manipulate her voice.

Wood follows her imagination and lets it take her music where it will, which is anything but a negative capability. You'll definitely fancy this CD for your collection, and I recommend acquiring it post-haste.