Patricia Barber's singing, piano playing and songwriting have an intimacy that is veiled in intimation. She feels close, but elusive, as if she's constantly singing from the shadows. They are beautiful shadows, though, with an alluring stylishness. Over the course of seven releases, Barber has steadily developed her unique style of dark, moody jazz. Barber includes wistful longing, ironic self-awareness and uncompromising hipness inside a calm, sparse approach.
On "Verse," her best album yet, she sings almost reluctantly, trailing off at times into a whisper, then rising back up with a scratchy, slurred tone as if waking from a dream. Still, she keeps things honest in their understatement. She directs her sensitive but sturdy emotions toward the analysis of relationships, observations on life and the pleasures of poetic wordplay.
In "Pieces," she confronts the fragments of herself left after a breakup, "There's a piece by the clock/Clinging awkwardly to time/There's a piece at the piano/Clinging stubbornly to rhyme/There's a fun piece of me/In a crack in the floor/An innocent piece/Who walked out the door."