At the risk of sounding like a music snob, my first encounter with My Brightest Diamond was their cover of Radiohead's "Lucky" on a tribute album earlier this year. Stripped of all external context, I had no idea whether they were a band, a solo artist, or whether this was their normal style of music, I was quite impressed. Laden with strings, stuttering percussion, and lush but sultry female vocals, it was quite an impressive take on an old classic, so when I saw she/they had a new album out, I jumped at the chance to have a listen.

Of course, after a bit of research I quickly determined that My Brightest Diamond was not a band, but instead was the performing name of American singer-songwriter Shara Worden, who has also worked in the past with big names such as Sufjan Stevens. I also quickly learned that what I'd already heard of her music was broadly representative of her style, although she is definitely no one-trick pony.

Inside A Boy, which begins the album, is a good representation of Worden's music on this album, starting out with a single guitar picking out a nervous, jumpy melody before some gentle strings and a bass guitar jump into the mix to propel the song forward. It's a tense, dark rocker of a song, with just enough distortion being added into the sliding guitar riff in the middle of the song to give it some teeth. Trebly tinkles of piano later on in the song only serve to heighten the tension, rather than providing any musical relief.

Subsequent tracks continue the bleak, unsettling motifs, from the quivering, trilling The Ice and The Storm and Apples, to the brooding, rough Bass Player. Of particular note is the six-minute To Pluto's Moon, which takes the creepy string-based themes of earlier tracks and stretches them out into a much longer piece, which ends up sounding like an odd fusion of early Cure and French café music, before culminating in an atonal climax reminiscent of the last few seconds of Karma Police by Radiohead.

Despite these good tracks, in many places "A Thousand Shark's Teeth" allows itself to become unfocused and fuzzy, particularly in the second half of the album. Filler tracks such as Like A Sieve and Goodbye Forever don't really add anything more to this album except further gauzy wanderings through waves of strings and other classical instruments, and they really detract from the flow of the album by taking away any momentum that the first half of the album builds up. The atmosphere that's built up completely evaporates during these tracks, which hurts the album overall.

These few tracks are a disappointment, because they spoil what would otherwise be a very good album. That's not to say that My Brightest Diamond has released something without any merit at all, but the string-heavy concept means that the album perhaps doesn't have the impact that it could have. In music like this, strings should be used for impact, but they're overused here and they just end up sounding tired and uninspired. My advice would be not to listen past the seventh track, and pretend that this is just a slightly longer-than-usual EP.