If you think pop music has nothing left to show you, take in Vienna Teng's third album Dreaming Through the Noise. There's a lot here, but you have to crawl through some dark places to get it. The lyrics are almost uniformly cryptic and disturbing:
 

	"I am the last one you'd ever suspect of setting the fire, but as you switch on your TV tomorrow morning, you'll hear...."
	"the quiet night that breaks me, like a dozen papercuts...."
	"truth this time is an ugly child"
	"Lake Pontchartrain is haunted: bones without names, photographs framed in reeds" (inspired by Hurricane Katrina)
	"I am nothing without you, but I don't know who you are"
	"I don't feel so well. I thought that you should know...." (i.e., don't fall in love with me)
	"he was a beautiful fiction I invented to keep out the cold"

Pretty chilling, wouldn't you say? Not exactly 'yummy, yummy, yummy, I got love in my tummy' (Top 40 song from the '60s).

Who knows what's she's really like, but on this album Teng affects to be a soul dancing on the edge of destruction, a canary in a coal mine aware of her predicament. And we're transfixed, like watching a car wreck.

The album has an integrity that reminds me of Elton John's Tumbleweed Connection and Cat Stevens' Tea for the Tillerman. Something about it tells me this is good honest work at a level the artist may not reach again (which, for me at least, turned out to be the case with Tumbleweed and Tea - I hope not in Teng's case). Teng's melodies flow, the harmonic structure is adventurous in parts, and the classical instrumentation (piano and strings) suits the seriousness of the subject matter well.

I can't remember the last time a pop album affected me this much. But then again, this isn't really pop music. It's Teng's art, and you don't know if it's going to heal her or send her over the edge. Don't let any disturbed members of your family near it. But for the rest of us, it's sublime.

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