There may be no home, according to the title, but there’s a certain consonance in Jana Hunter’s latest album — There’s No Home, between the vulture and the traveler, the absence and the union, the ceremony and the recital. Beauty and peculiarity, gypsies and babies, come to agreement, not out of hard-fought compromise, but effortless dispossession and abandon. And where there’s harmony there’s a place to nurture and mature.

Don’t be mistaken: this album moves. More than a few songs are open road, inspire getting on. But on this journey, inspired by both nostalgia and expectation, the hearth fires burn wherever the singer and her harmonizers go, with the unmistakable presence and comfort of the moment.

It opens with soft, repetitive, overlapping guitar lines, and a voice that’s deep but almost a whisper, in harmony with itself: “I open my hands to you, I open my hands to you, and I showed you my palms, I showed you my soft skin, for what it really was. When I walk myself home, when I walk myself home, I feel your breath, even though you’re already, long gone.“

Wordless moans follow, accompanied by gentle electric piano. I was immediately put into the mindset of a Will Oldham record, and in particular the song, “I Send My Love To You.” The way there’s only longing that completes a love; the way the searcher recognizes the beloved in all he sees, touches, hears. Beloved gone, the veils are lifted on every thing, the responses revealed in the searching.

When the songs on There’s No Home aren’t moving on, they’re pausing to absorb one’s new surroundings, and feeding back to the unity in the diversity. At turns I’m in the throes of an energetic Windsor for the Derby jam, and of a contemplative Mick Turner composition, and like the high expressiveness of Oldham’s male voice, the low expressiveness of Hunter’s female voice evokes a golden heart soothing a restless soul, yearning for the source it feels yearning just as much for it.

The instruments are entwined perfectly, just as the voices are blended perfectly. Every individual one is distinct but dependent, inspired. Songs start and leave quickly, but stick sweetly, like the snippet memories of a peyote-fueled campfire all-nighter. They make you rock, in the to-and-fro way, in the ghostly, introspective-but-communal-wanting ways that Oldahm, Turner and Windsor can do so well.

“Bird,” at only 2:43, captures so much — the desire to explain, to pray, to apologize, to plead, to prophesize about transcending self — in a sing-along celebration. Then “Pinnacle” begins, pitch darkness and lost. The singer sounds threatening, threatened, fought someone, broken. She’s abandoned by the companions — her love, god, bird, friend and dog — whom she sang to in the previous song. The drums and guitar menace and confuse.

A short guitar meditation, then, yea, a revelatory strum-drum, strum-drum ode to the stability and identity of place, where every detail is right there to be absorbed, and to soothe the loose panic of endless concepts. A few minutes later, and we’re in the tight trance of the next song, hypnotized by the repetitive guitar notes, the tight snare beats and impossibly slow, low voices coming to the conclusion, can’t wait to leave.

All elements of the songs cycle like this, lulling and breaking, the both just as lovely as they are expected, because they play with time and mundane with a seductiveness that you didn’t stop to realize existed in their fragile but everlasting meters. In “Sleep” the sibling Hunters, Jana and John, sing a lullaby inviting sleep at both dawn and at dusk, when the light and dark transition into one another and the prospects of greeting and escaping life’s travails mingle gently for the traveler.

After twelve songs with one-word titles and two tracks marked just (guitar), we come to the final say, the title cut, “There’s No Home.” The clockwork strums of the acoustic guitar keep steady time while an electric guitar reverberates over Jana’s emotive singing, mumbling and soaring at the beat of a heart. Over the entire album, but also contained within this track alone, we hear the breadth and depth of Jana’s earthy-but-otherworldly voice, often in multi-track harmony with herself.

The term “freak folk” has become a popular way to classify certain music, including Hunter’s. I think of her style as more spooky than freaky. Although There’s No Home isn’t quite as spooky as its predecessor, it’s more focused and thematic, thus making it a stronger record. I’d put it alongside such albums as Oldham’s Arise Therefore, Turner’s Moth, Windsor’s Difference and Repetition and Songs: Ohia’s Ghost Tropic as a spooky masterpiece. Not to mention last year’s marvelous Beach House and Metallic Falcons albums (the latter of which Jana participated in).

I’m sure there are others I’m not thinking of at the moment. Time to go create a playlist and scour the iPod for more. I know they’re in there somewhere, hiding and spying like spirits, wanting to roam but only needing a proper home.

Jana Hunter MySpace
Gnomonsong Records