Basia Bulat Ponders Honesty and Self-Deception on the Stirring ‘Are You in Love?’

Love is a Pandora’s box of trouble on the unsettling fifth album from Canada’s Basia Bulat. Not just a source of heartbreak, it can be an illusion that keeps you from seeing clearly, and perhaps a cruel trick played by chemistry. “Are you in love when you’re in love?” Bulat sighs on the gorgeous opening track, casting a wary eye on the very concept of love as she considers its endless complications. Bracing and insightful, Are You in Love? offers unvarnished observations rather than reassurance, and is all the more compelling for it.

Produced by My Morning Jacket’s Jim James, who also manned the controls on her previous outing, 2016’s Good Advice, this lovely set embodies smoldering tension, setting Bulat’s eloquent angst against a subtle but sturdy chamber-folk backdrop that often expands to encompass stirring pop melodrama. The shimmering guitars, graceful keyboards, and tender strings provide the perfect complement to her sober, almost stoic voice, which evokes emotional turmoil without wallowing in it. Like Tracy Chapman and Joni Mitchell before her, Bulat projects a sense of purpose rather than an eagerness to entertain at all costs.

If Good Advice was a breakup album, Are You in Love? finds her sifting through the wreckage for useful lessons, striving to lead a life governed by honesty instead of self-deception, and urging others to follow suit. The jangly “Hall of Mirrors” addresses a friend seduced by “admirers / Who don’t see you at all,” asking, “Are you lost?”, while “The Last Time” surveys a doomed relationship defined by “old mistakes,” noting, “We’re making them night after night,” as the song turns epic. Surely a hit single in an alternate reality, the toe-tapping “Your Girl” bluntly declares, “You let down your girl / Now she’s never coming back again,” refusing to offer hope as Bulat adds, “I won’t forget.” Or forgive, apparently.

The struggle to embrace forgiveness, and the crucial need to let go of anger and regret, become explicit on the breathtaking “Already Forgiven,” where she poignantly declares, “I want to leave my mind and let my old ways fall,” yet admits it can take years to move on. The quietly devastating power of this remarkable performance would put most flashier singers to shame.

Elsewhere, Bulat can make a potent racket when the situation demands. On the taut “No Control,” an anguished response to betrayal, and the gentler, more optimistic closing tune, “Love Is at the End of the World,” she repeatedly chants the song’s title, as if reaching for the kind of visceral, ecstatic release found in old-fashioned gospel music.

Are You in Love? has a few less-electrifying moments, but these lulls in the intensity are almost a welcome break from the harrowing accounts that shape it. However discomfiting, Bulat’s fearless pursuit of difficult truths feels like vital, and ultimately uplifting, therapy.