Try listening to Pink Floyd's The Wall for two straight weeks. You'll develop some sort of mental disorder. But why? Surely it's a great album? The answer lies in The Wall's emotional highs, its strong lead guitars and intense singing, all of which demand a lot from the listener. For the Pink Floyd fan suffering from this mental disorder, Amanda Thorpe's Mass is the perfect antidote. Don't get me wrong -- Mass has plenty of emotion, but it's channeled completely differently than most music. Unlike The Wall, Mass has no guitar solos or bleeding-heart voices. Rather, the album is filled with rounded curves and smooth, smooooooth instrumentation, but it avoids excessive production glitz. The emotions are created subtly, and the music literally sounds like smoke. You can make out the individual guitars, the synthesized organ, the drums, etc., but the overall sound portrays a single, beautiful emotion. The individual songs aren't static; Thorpe's voice allows the music to keep moving.

There's definitely a trace of folk music here, but not in the traditional sense. First of all, the album has groove -- arguably the single redeeming value of today's rap/hip-hop music, and not something you'll find in yesterday's folk music. Mass also avoids the sticky, wholesome feel you get when listening to traditional folk artists like Peter, Paul and Mary. There's also a good bit of jazz scattered throughout the album, giving it an unmistakable smoky-bar feeling. The first time I heard Bob Dylan's Time Out of Mind, I imagined a smoke-filled bar peopled by washed-out old men. When listening to Mass, the same image came to me, but this time with a pretty, young woman entering the bar...

Don't assume that Thorpe's music is vague and hazy; songs like "Toy Guitar" and "High & Dry" have surprisingly addictive choruses. The album's faults lie in its lyrics. Lines like "Do you ever take the time to look around you?" and "Open my eyes that I may see / the things that mean the most to me" seem a little too anxious to pull your heartstrings. Nonetheless, it is the voice in the atmosphere, rather than what the voice actually has to say -- that pulls you in.

I love The Wall...but we need albums like Mass to pull us down from the pretentious highs we get from listening to it.