This CD contains an amazing mix of sounds and tempos.  And the sound feels like it comes from a very seasoned veteran.  The melodies can be haunting or catchy.  I recommend it to anyone, since it seems to have something for everyone!
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Middle names don't usually serve much purpose, and are just embarrassing details on driver's licenses. But it's their ''buried away'' nature that prompted singer / songwriter Emily Easterly to name her new eight-song CD after her middle name, Cole. ''Middle names are very much a part of a person, but not in the forefront,'' she says. ``Which is the way I feel about these songs.''

Co-produced by Easterly and Miguel Urbiztondo (drummer for Tweaker and Koester) and engineered by Alan Weatherhead (who's played with Cracker, Tim Buckley and Sparklehorse), Cole is a promising mixture of Fiona Apple (without the anger) and Mazzy Star's quiet seductiveness. The songs are not dark, but evoke daily things that barely register: the simple sensuality of an unmade bed, shafts of light in a shuttered room, the quiet spaces in conversation. Revolving around the themes of desire and frustration, Easterly sings as if, to get to her destination, she needs to circumvent uncooperative walls and flesh, as in the lead track ''Concrete Floor'' (sample line: ``Wishing here on a concrete floor, hoping you could make it through a cement door'').

Easterly is at her best on the mildly desperate ''Tuesday'' (''But it wouldn't be hard this Tuesday, to make enough room for you to stay''), and the soft brushes of ``Bad Luck'' (``You and me, just driving away, from a bad, bad day''), are as soothing as fingers running through your hair.

Cole is a good album, and a promising harbinger of things to come from Easterly, a relative newcomer to the scene.
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