Introducing: Laura Barrett

Name: Laura Barrett
From: Toronto, Canada
Story: Geek-chic Canuck pin-up plucks kalimba, sings sci-fi
Sound: "Dystopic-stage-musical prog-folk"

Every Monday from here to infinity, I've decided, will be seized as an opportunity to introduce you to a musician of non-famous stature. Maybe someone just starting out. Maybe someone who is about to release their first album. Maybe someone like Laura Barrett.

A sometime member of Toronto's gay-pop big-band the Hidden Cameras, Barrett has, for the past two years, been conducting a singular musical study: writing songs on the kalimba. Occasionally known as the 'African thumb-piano,' the kalimba is a hand-held block of plucked metal 'keys' that has a distinctive, dry, percussive, very metallic sound. Few have ever used it as an instrument of focus, which is where Barrett comes in.

Beginning with her 2007 Earth Sciences EP --which features an unbelievable reading of "Weird' Al" Yankovic's grunge-era parody "Smells Like Nirvana," and a song advertising the fictional far-future pets "Robot Ponies"-- Barrett has been authoring a series of sprightly, playful, often-science-fiction-themed songs matching her wordy lyricism to circular, tumbling kalimba patterns.

After a couple of stripped-down EPs, her out-this-week debut album, Victory Garden, uses the kalimba as just one of many recurring elements. Building grand layers of piano, tuned percussion, and stabs of strings and woodwinds, Barrett has created an album steeped in both showtune-ish songwriterism and modern-classical composition.

Comparisons don't abound, but Barrett's pal Owen Pallett of Final Fantasy is an obvious orchestral ally, the glasses and use of the word "sperlunk" dial up Seattle songsmith Laura Veirs, the marriage of word-game lyricism ("a reasonable finch'll flinch") and plucked, exotic instrumentage can call to mind Joanna Newsom, and the final, cluttered, avant-gardist orgy "Victory Mashup" almost reminds of Nico Muhly's 'exploded' compositions. Of course, these names only frame Barrett, really. Far from the garden-variety folkie warbler, she is an odd bird of unusual plumage.

• Listen: Laura Barrett "Bluebird"
• Compare Prices: Laura Barrett, Victory Garden
• Laura Barrett on MySpace