Heartbeats Accelerating

Their previous album, the fine but underappreciated Love Over and Over, had found the McGarrigles nodding cautiously toward more explicit pop and rock accents, but their cult-sized audience was likely hoping for a return to the more acoustic atmosphere of earlier records. At first listen, then, Heartbeats Accelerating is a modest shock, laced with coproducer Pierre Marchand's (Sarah McLachlan) moody synthesizers and a slightly chillier feel to the album's overall sound. Yet those modern elements ultimately work, underlining the songs' more fatalistic perspective, especially on the set's bittersweet zenith, "I Eat Dinner." In her inventory of a divorced mother's solitary meal, Kate McGarrigle captures no less than the death of romance, her very restraint making its dry-eyed contemplation of life after love quietly devastating. --Sam Sutherland