Duality

Listening to Hannah Bussiere Kim’s debut LP as Luna Li, you may get the sensation of being somewhere other than where you are: a smooth plastic beach (“Afterglow”), a cradle of stars (“Misery Moon”), the gleaming lobby of some extraterrestrial hotel (“Cherry Pit”). Like Stereolab, Broadcast, and Pizzicato Five before her, the Toronto-based singer-songwriter is fluent in musical languages of the past (lounge, old Hollywood soundtracks, ’60s folk-pop) and has a gift for making kitschy, easy-listening sounds feel personal, substantive, even transportive—the latter a quality that gives otherwise ordinary musings a cosmic lightness (“Alone But Not Lonely”). Then you learn that she played basically all of it herself—the guitars, the bass, the sparkling harp arpeggios and swirling violins—and you get it: She’s not just writing songs, she’s building a place she can retreat to, three minutes at a time.