Eliana Glass sings torch songs, late night love songs, and her manners evoke Billie Holiday, Patti Waters, Frank Sinatra to name a few that come to mind in an instant and go away so quickly. her voice and presence with her are from somewhere else. This American singer, who released her record with the French, the always amazing Shelter Press, is also in a great moment of modernity: what she sings seems to point to the state of mind of young people today, haunted by absence, emptiness, flaws of love in all its forms. Sorry, it also speaks to the older ones: what happens between her and us is in perpetual motion, listening refines over the days, it reveals other stratas of reality, other dark, dark beauties. The voice of this person navigates our troubles, writes its delicacy to even the matter of our fears, and installs around us something from elsewhere. Where does she sing from?

Eliana Glass doesn’t really sing songs as much as she inhabits them, her voice functioning like sonar as it sizes up a tune almost as if it was a room.

Eliana Glass is the latest vocalist/composer to make intimate, spare balladry sublime again.

Across E, Glass performs songs—both her own as well as those by Carla Bley and Annette Peacock—with a clarity that proves intimately homespun but also eminently transportive.