Joni Davis, A Bird’s Heart

There’s a scene in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine where the Time Traveler pushes his machine millions of years into the future and sits on a beach under a dying red sun. There, he watches life itself begin to fade, like a person with terminal cancer slipping off bit by bit. If, when he had come to a stop, there had been a girl at a piano quietly singing a requiem for the Earth, that girl would have to be Joni Davis.

A Bird’s Heart is the San Francisco native’s second album, and it could not be more full of idyllic emptiness than if it was an inside-out zero. “Haunting,” “ethereal,” and “beautiful” are words that have already been thrown at her numerous times, but they’re none the worse here for having been used before. Every track on the album sounds like it was recorded with a broken heart on Mars, tripping along in orbit with little more than her soul voice and grand piano.

There’s little here of the dynamic change-ups in tempo and tone that make other piano artists like Nick Cave and Tori Amos the trailblazers that they are; Joni Davis tends to stick with what she does best. She does that very well, however, and I wish that everyone who insists on calling Amy Winehouse great just because she’s got a soul voice would pick up this album instead. She’s really real.