Anti-Diva: Susie Suh

Susie Suh’s eponymous collection is the debut of a twenty-five-year-old who grew up performing Korean folk songs on local TV with a children’s choir in her native Los Angeles. At age thirteen, she moved east to attend Exeter, then (after a year at NYU) finished a degree in English at Brown. Her album appears not on one of the countless indie labels that mainly supply pop music with uncliched new artists right now, but on an old-line New York major, Epic, and was produced not by some brilliant flip-flopped school chum of Suh’s, but by Glen Ballard, as enormous a Los Angeles pop producer as exists, a multiplatinum dude who brought us Alanis Morissette. But the record doesn’t sound like recently matured youth showbiz or expensively educated singer-songwriterdom or record-biz money or even the Hollywood rock players Ballard casts on the predominantly acoustic tracks; the record sounds like 2005’s least preordained music.

If you could imagine Whitney Houston or Mariah Carey engaged in songs excised of all divahood, you might have the start of an idea of what Suh sounds like; clearly her voice, a highly emotional engine of silk and smoke and breaks and flows, boasts more sonic dimensionality than any new singer’s in years, and time and again on Susie Suh her singing occupies, enlivens, and stretches through spaces in the spare arrangements in ways that most singer-songwriters’ voices physically cannot. Because such generously melodic songs as “Your Battlefield,” “Shell,” and “All I Want” are in their bones modern blues, a lesser singer would just work that notionally emotional terrain and make a whizbang genre impression guaranteed to wow fans of the style.

Suh never does that. Just as she forgoes the big diva moves she’s outfitted to make, she accordingly resists ge­neric allegiance. On “Petrified to be God-like,” she sings an English postpunk blues the Cure’s Robert Smith might have written, given both the sadly mirrored tint of its closely curbed minor-key melody and its depressive self-indictment. But elsewhere, singing an otherworldly love song such as “Light on My Shoulder” or hanging out in the mall parking lot in “Seasons Change,” dressed in her “work uniform,” trying to warm somehow to “vacant cars,” Suh sounds like nothing except herself.

Actually, there is something it sounds like. Between 1795 and 1805, a Korean crown princess began to write, at sixty, a series of four memoirs about the trying life...