looks to the canon of horror and death and paranoia as an emotional place to start. If the ability to scare the shit out of a grooving audience is a difficult high-wire act, Halliday's eerily supple voice manages half of that on its own. The album's first single, "Fair Accompli," features the singer at her J&M Chain best – pained and ominously sexy as she drones, "I've come to make you feel old." Elsewhere, with equal conviction, Halliday chants prettily, backing herself with Cocteau Twins-like washes of sound on "Ice That Melts the Tips," and sneers nastily on the self-explanatory "Wish You Dead." "Already Yours" shows off an unexpected, piercing falsetto that recalls Sinéad O'Connor, but Halliday is entirely more abrasive, more sensuous, more threatening. And all the time, like a bunch of loony-bin orderlies doggedly ignoring a ranting patient, guitars grind and grind behind her, though never disguising the songs' transcendently lovely melodies. Doppelgänger is like a fuzzy nightmare from which you wake up dancing. (RS 630)

ARION BERGER