Album Review: Are You in Love? by Basia Bulat

Rating: NNNN Sometimes when a collection of songs doesn't come easily, you can hear it in the final result: laboured, overthought, worked-to-death. But Basia Bulat's fifth album avoids this fate. Despite needing to take a nine-month break from working on it, the Toronto-born, Montreal-based musician and sometimes U.S. Girls contributor (hear her on their new album Heavy Light) has given us 13 exuberant folk-pop songs delivered with clarity, colour and conviction.

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The cover for Are You in Love? is a painting of Basia Bulat by Toronto-based artist Kris Knight. It depicts Bulat basking in the sun with her eyes closed, completely absorbed in the present. The image feels like the result of the arduous journey that Bulat goes through on her fifth album. Across the record, she reflects on how good love makes us feel, but on tracks like "Already Forgiven," where Bulat sifts through instrumental haze toward forgiveness, or the title track, where she's on a tough, winding road toward vulnerability, she also meditates on the hard work that it takes to let love in..

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