As a solo artist, Kristin Hersh spent much of the last decade exploring distant variations on the sound she once defined, abandoning loud, skittering guitar-pop for folk and smoothed-out MOR. Learn to Sing Like a Star threads together Hersh's myriad musical guises while striving for some of the immediacy and distinctive yelp of her Throwing Muses heyday. It mostly works, especially on songs like "Vertigo," an acoustic lament with a gently descending melody, and "Peggy Lee," an ominous, wondrous, weird, and catchy ballad that resembles a more streamlined version of Joanna Newsom. And while Hersh Doesn't shoot for the arresting psychodrama she used to, the slightly washed-out feeling of Learn to Sing becomes more involving as it progresses, culminating in the closing track "The Thin Man," in which her low rasp sounds like amplified smoke.

-Noel Murray