UPDATE: Yim Yames, AKA My Morning Jacket's Jim James, has added Cortney Tidwell's excellent Boys to his most fab Removador website/digital music store -- finally giving the album (on which he guests) an "official" U.S. release January 19. Tidwell not only delivered one of the finest releases of the year in Boys, she absolutely made our socks roll up and down with a live show this past fall in Nashville that still has us reeling with giddy delight. Read on:

There are any number of puzzling aspects to Boys, the sophomore album from Nashville's Cortney Tidwell -- the most important of which is why this adventurous, critically adored and simply stunning, genre-smashing '09 album still has only been released outside of the U.S. (until now). Other head scratchers might involve how this troubled daughter of a Music Row A+R exec and 60's country singer ended up with a blenderized concoction of airy Bjork-meets-Cocteau Twins vocal electronic atmospherics, stark neo-folk songs, unsettling Radiohead-styled dissonant power and a dark shadows lyricism that makes Polly Harvey seem like a moon-in-June romantic.

Boys - a concept created with her husband/producer, children and male musician friends in mind - is an album of opposites attracting, a schizophrenic dichotomy of dream pop, trip-hop and eerie, even spooky undertones. Already a huge critical hit in the U.K. ("spectacular" - MOJO, "stunning...an album of grace, beauty and invention" - Q), Boys is a sometimes challenging, always rewarding collection of songs that offer haunting allure and subtle pleasures. From the quietly magnificent, drifting "Oslo" to the Twin Peak-ish menace of "Solid State", Tidwell's disarming voice finds that special space between lullabye slumber and intoxicating dreamscape. Highly recommended.

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Cortney Tidwell - Solid State" (from the album Boys)

Cortney Tidwell - "Oslo" (from the album Boys)