On Darker Wings of Song

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With a voice as pure as birdsong, she has soared to the top of the charts, becoming New Zealand's biggest-selling female artist. No, we're not talking about Hayley Westenra, the Wellington schoolgirl who took Amazing Grace to Enya-like heights, but the exotic musical hybrid that is Bic Runga. In 2002, a year before Westenra hit her high notes, this Maori-Chinese singer-songwriter took the simple guitar hooks of Drive to a new level with Beautiful Collision, an album in which she exploded genres - from folk to rock to country - with the glassy resonance of her voice. So it's strange to find her latest release, Birds, darker and scuzzier sounding, as if it were an original '60s session tape rediscovered in an old suitcase.

Turn to the CD's liner notes for clues and you find, even more mystifyingly, black-and-white pictures of stuffed birds - some extinct - from Fiona Pardington's photo series "Fugitive Beings." But in the simple acknowledgment, "this recording is dedicated to my mother Sophia in memory of my father Te Okoro 'Joe' Runga," Runga's musical mission becomes clearer. Birds is about flying into the past - and finding your feet.

On previous albums, Runga showed herself to be a musical minx, dressing up in various guises to reveal snippets of herself (on Beautiful Collision, echoes of Johnny Cash and The Mamas and the Papas are seemingly remixed by Björk). Birds finds her much closer to home. As it transpires, Runga's Chinese mother was a cabaret singer in Malaysia during the '60s, and on the new album the singer seems to channel that era's songbirds, from Françoise Hardy (Say After Me) and Dusty Springfield (If I Had You), to Karen Carpenter (Winning Arrow). These are songs of fragile hope, unrequited love and broken hearts. But the emotion is veiled, as if caught in the mists of time, where nostalgia is the only true thing. "In the face of things that change," she sings on the lilting, country-tinged Listen, "we'll stay the same, oh yeah."

The other thing you notice on Birds is how Runga's voice has settled more deeply into the landscape of her songs - which is perhaps no coincidence. Last year, just after she returned home to tour with the Finn brothers after living for a while in Paris, Runga's father died. The confluence of events helped her focus on what mattered with her music: the unvarnished truth of performing live. And for the recording of Birds, Runga gathered around her a band of like-minded souls - from Neil Finn on piano and bass guitarist Conrad Standish, of The Devastations, to The Boxcar Guitars' Benny Maitland on harmonica - to capture the intimacy of her stage shows. Through this haunted house of sounds, creaking and echoing with bouzouki-style guitar and harp, her voice weaves its silky web. "I know you have laid a trap for me," she whispers on the spellbinding Captured. And captured we are.