Learn to Sing Like a Star would be a more ironic title if Kristin Hersh hadn't done just that. On her most mainstream album to date, the ever-probing Hersh is careful (without being over-cautious) to color within the lines, retaining the intimacy of past submissions while taking a decidedly centrist approach. Hersh has always gone to lengths to distinguish between her solo output and that of the on-again/off-again Throwing Muses, but Learn to Sing... has less in common with her spare 2003 solo The Grotto than it does with the band’s simultaneously released eponymous reunion album. Seeking the fellowship of TM's drummer David Narcizo and stringsters Martin and Kimberlee McCarrick was the right move: Hersh's dense, imagistic sketches are richer in the grander setting, and her fractured, quasi-tortured tales manage to be both more demanding and touchable when magnified. Hersh is undeniably less adverse to linearity here, but she’s not quite ready to make it easy either.