Kristin Hersh

The prolific songwriter has avoided this problem by releasing her eighth solo album as a lavishly produced hardback book that contains song essays and a code that unlocks a digital treasure trove of tracks, outtakes, audio commentary and extracts from her forthcoming autobiography.

In the context of an album, songs that originally existed as discrete online entities become chapters in a book that are united by lyrical motifs - "clear/clean" are favoured adjectives and highway flotsam is a recurrent image. These patterns also fit with the tenor of the album, which has a yearning sadness that's shot through with diffused rays of hope.

Picking up where 2007's Sing Like A Star left off, the album favours a more electric, fuller sound than her formative explorations as a solo artist. This is perhaps a little ironic given that Hersh played all the instruments herself, recording drums without a click track on top of voice and guitar. This adds a certain lolloping looseness to the release, an unpolished quality that bears some of the grunginess of her 1996 Throwing Muses release Limbo and the fogginess of 1999's Sky Motel - on which the "whale song" guitar solo on Fortune could easily belong.

The overarching result of this fuzziness spread over 10 tracks is one of raging confusion. This is sign-posted on opener Mississippi Kite, one of the release's highlights, which has an unsettling claustrophobia in its woozy bluesy organ and guitar. This is also true of the brooding title track on which the hope is leavened by her bittersweet voice, grown husky and ravaged through years of live performance.

The tone of these contrast with the other standout track, Flooding, a tender acoustic paean to a lost friend that has a cello-shaped hole at its centre. It has the sadness of 2003's The Grotto and is the only moment that references her more acoustic back catalogue. Where the melancholy was brittle and controlled, however, here it seethes with uncertainty. Indeed, there's only the roiling guitar riff on closer Rubidoux that could be described as truly happy.

It's this constancy of tone that, if anything, is the album's main fault and one that's exacerbated by access to often superior tracks that failed to make the final cut. The tautness of Sand, for instance, could gladly have been replaced by Morning Birds - a terrific six-minute number that migrates from rage to calm with the controlled soft rock of 1995's University. The shimmery Moan, meanwhile, lacks purpose while Speedbath has an electricity that reverberates with dangerous excitement.

Such quibbles are, however, the product of gorging on digital content and feeling too bloated to be satisfied with tracks that feed into one another with the surety of chapters reaching a forlornly compelling conclusion.