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Lady Lamb the Bee­keeper (Aly Spal­tro) is one of those rare indi­vid­u­als for whom musi­cal expres­sion is so nat­ural, so inher­ently part of her being, that she’s able to pro­duce truly mov­ing art with a grace sel­dom seen at her age (or any age, for that mat­ter). When her plans to travel to Guata­mala between high school and col­lege fell through and she was sud­denly faced with a year of aim­less­ness, Spal­tro made a con­scious deci­sion to begin mak­ing music. Under most nor­mal cir­cum­stances, this seems like a log­i­cal step, but I neglected to men­tion that prior to mak­ing this deci­sion Spal­tro had no musi­cal expe­ri­ence. So, she began to assem­ble her arse­nal, begin­ning not with instru­ments, but with the means by which to cap­ture her (at this point imag­i­nary) songs–an 8 track tape recorder. That’s right, she bought the record­ing equip­ment first. Now that’s commitment.

But she had a clear and sim­ple con­cept in mind: she wanted to layer instru­ments, to cre­ate songs with an empha­sis on sonic tex­ture. When most musi­cians say some­thing like this, their music ends up sound­ing like an Ani­mal Col­lec­tive b-side, or some equally soupy col­lage of over­lap­ping sam­ples, but not so with Spal­tro. Her songs have their ori­gins in folk music and the more del­i­cate side of mod­ern indie pop. A cer­tain inno­cence per­vades them that’s maybe bet­ter described as conviction–there’s no sense that she’s “try­ing” to accom­plish any­thing in par­tic­u­lar, but rather cre­at­ing exactly the songs that she needs to cre­ate in exactly the way that she needs to cre­ate them. There’s lit­tle to no artis­tic pre­ten­sion in her music, just a quarter-inch cable from her brain to your stereo.

For­mat: 7-inch vinyl