Nude Nudes

The first solo album from Josephine Wiggs, bass player for The Perfect Disaster and The Breeders, makes a virtue of extreme restraint. It’s an incredibly spare album – mostly constructed from just acoustic guitar, bass and drums (provided by Jon Mattock of Spacemen 3 and Spiritualized), Wiggs’s songs are skeletal things, her guitar rarely striking anything so full-bodied as a chord, but they simply do away with everything but the fundamentals. The end result is an album of odd, yet melodically rich songs – prickly at times, sensuous at others – that take their time to say things simply. The closing “Let’s Sail Away” is the perfect ending, a long strand of song that drifts off, an infinite horizon translated to music.