Singer/songwriter/guitarist Elizabeth Powell set about making an album that could encompass a great deal with very little, an aesthetic in stark contrast to the orchestral pop and digi-tweaked indie chic. With bassist Chris McCarron and drummer Andrew Barr (The Slip), the band set up in an old converted church outside of Montreal and recorded nine songs with the helping hands of Justin Vernon (Bon Iver). The tenth and final track, “Troubled,” was recorded in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, at Vernon’s parents’ home.

The album is simply a continuation of the internal conversation Powell has been holding with herself since she began this musical lark, more than a decade ago, with a 14-year-old’s creaky-voiced acuteness, spouting the uncomfortable truths of a woman thrice her years and many times more guarded.

Powell is as unrelenting in her appraisal of the world as she’s ever been, and it’s a world as pitiably venal as it is lovingly rendered. With Powell’s sense of story and Vernon’s fresh perspective, they set a perfect bridge from the jangling dissonance and ferocious doubled voicings of the debut album, towards the road-weathered clarity and reflection she has now begun to own so fully. When the title track hits four songs in, it’s clear why “Some Are Lakes” is the album’s anthem call, as much a nostalgic tramp through summers past and love unending as a backhand ode to the very album it appears on.

The fierce spotlight of Powell’s attention points inward and has begun exposing a more private side of the nascent iconoclast. There’s nothing fragile in it. The honesty makes it steel. That in itself is a kind wonder. Where once one might have questioned whether Powell was shielding herself under the gauze and frenzy of her music, the new songs prove that she's ready to strike at the heart of even her own cherished conceits, and come out of it fresh, fighting fit and game for putting herself on the line in the spirit of true musical confession.