Kismet

There’s a shape-shifting quality to Jesca Hoop on her 2007 debut Kismet — one minute she’s an enraptured flower-child, the next a hard-bitten materialist or a fuzzy-headed old lady. Hoop counts Tom Waits as a friend and supporter and at times, you can hear echoes of his prickly mix of folk, show tunes and European cabaret motifs in these tracks. But Hoop’s kaleidoscopic lyric imagery and fondness for shifting tempos are distinctively hers. She sounds intoxicated with life in “Summertime,” needled by temptation in “Money” and ready for reckless abandon in “Out the Back Door.” Such tracks as “Seed of Wonder” and “Intelligence 101” gush with torrential imagery and restless rhythms, making contemplative songs like “Enemy” and “Love is All We Have” (the latter a glimpse of a Katrina-devastated New Orleans) welcome islands of calm. With her supple, jazz-inflected voice, Hoops convincingly embodies her exotic characters, as the woozy “Dreams in the Hollow” and the dramatic “Havoc in Heaven” reveal. Though its arrangements are a tad overcooked at times, Kismet is a generally enthralling showcase for Hoop’s abundant and still-evolving talent.