Heart Shaped Bed

To say there’s a disconnect between Nicole Dollanganger’s pristine, angelic voice and her weighty, extremely graphic subject matter would be an understatement. The Grimes-approved Ontario singer nominally trades in the ambient textures, artfully smeared melodies and subliminal rhythms of dream pop, but the songs on her sixth album, <i>Heart Shaped Bed</i>, are more likely to unsettle rather than soothe. “Lemonade” may come on like a lonesome piano ballad about domestic doldrums, but it leads to a tawdry, vengeful tale of infidelity that climaxes with distorted drone verging on doom metal. And while the minimalist R&B of the title track invokes the ultimate honeymoon accoutrement, it’s less a story of consummated romance than of a desperate attempt to rekindle it. This is an album whose idea of a pickup line is “I don’t want to be your girl/I want to be your gun/Blow that jaw right off that handsome face” (the chilling pop-noir of “Beautiful & Bad”), and where desire leads to fantasies of death (“My Baby”). <i>Heart Shaped Bed</i> isn’t just a portrait of innocence lost—it's a rumination on whether innocence is even a natural state in the first place.