That Joel Thibodeau's slender, winsome voice is at once so comforting and so unsettling might be the greatest of his many strengths.

Reed-thin but sturdy, youthful but somehow ageless, its deep benevolence is also slightly eerie, and the way he gently walks the line between intense feeling and contemplative remove lets him sing from a timeless place where he evokes the beauty of vanished people and places, sweetness too profound for words, loss too great for tears.

Like Nico's, Jimmy Scott's, or Phil Elverum's, Joel's is a voice that demands its own sonic and lyrical world, and with Island Intervals, his third record as Death Vessel (and second for Sub Pop), we're treated to the sound of him finding a rich and strange new home among new friends in Iceland who probably saw him as a long-lost relative.

Joel's an inveterate and intuitive wanderer; when I met him years ago, he'd just spent a few months traveling the United States on Greyhound buses, sometimes sleeping rough, and making a record from found moments.

Island Intervals springs from a more recent journey. For his first album since 2008's acclaimed Nothing Is Precious Enough for Us, Joel traveled to Reykjavík on an invitation from Sigur Rós singer Jónsi and producer Alex Somers, where they spent three months together conjuring an album that's both a song cycle and a window into a mysterious and singular landscape.

Island Intervals wraps Joel's voice and furtive guitar in sounds that evoke not so much a band playing as elemental forces of earth and water; Pete Donnelly (The Figgs, NRBQ), Samuli Kosminen (Múm) and Thorvaldur "Doddi" Thorvaldsson assist Somers in creating a rich and multi-layered world that sounds, at times, like a well-tuned forest sighing and bending in a gale, or the deep cracks and booms of a glacier calving its way to the sea.

Jónsi also joins Joel on vocals for the track "Ilsa Drown." Island Intervals lives in the spaces between running away and letting go, and finds its author embracing a life whose most solid, real moments loom and vanish, like a range of mountains that emerges from a bank of low clouds, and just as suddenly slips away.

- Jonathan Meiburg (Shearwater), Nov. 2013