If Cynthia Hopkins has learned anything from composing music for the theater and busking in New York subways, it's that music sounds best when put in the employ of an good story. Which is why the actual musical part of her band, Gloria Deluxe, sometimes feels so tasteful and unobtrusive as to be nearly subliminal, touching on blues, country and folk without necessarily evoking any particular genre. But listening to their second album, Hooker, I get the suspicion that Hopkins meant it that way; during an interlude, she muses about how fragments of half-heard music can lodge in one's brain and be resurrected by seemingly unrelated moments.

Perhaps that's how Gloria Deluxe is supposed to work, then: Hooker is one of those stealth albums that appears pleasantly harmless in an untrendy sort of way, the music you listen to when you're not really listening to music. And all the while, pieces of it drift around in your head, floating to the surface at odd moments-- waiting for a light to change, shopping for laundry detergent, staring out the window while putting off writing a music review, and so on and so forth.

But while the music sneaks in through the back door, Hopkins is the one with the spotlight on her, and she's got charisma enough to carry the music along in her wake. Her voice, an opaque drawl that bears a resemblance to a sleepy Billie Holiday, is such that she can sing the same way on every song, and each song can define her mood differently. On janglier, poppier numbers like "Cheap Two-Faced Star" and "Little Piece of Grace," she approaches a Liz Phair-like deadpan; in the sleazy horn-laden burlesque of "Down in the Mud," she unrepentantly sings the praises of drug abuse with a sexy, yet chilling, blankness; in "Hospital Waiting Room Blues," she strikes the perfect tone of weary apprehension and regret as befits the recipient of a rather morbid injury who's still too drunk to be anesthetized. The only song she doesn't quite pull off is the damning portrait of the vicious cycle of familial abuse and neglect of "Family Tree." But then again, it'd be nearly impossible for anyone to carry off such subject matter without appearing a tad heavy-handed.

The flow of Hooker feels almost effortless-- a guitar picks up where a trumpet leaves off, an accordion joins in, and suddenly you notice that it's a different song. Which is not to say that the whole album sounds the same; for the first two-thirds of the record, Gloria Deluxe moves through a surprising number of tempo and tone changes and still manages to connect it all together. Towards the end, though, things mellow out a bit too much, with "Beyond My Wildest Dreams" and "Once in the Mountains" not really registering. Although Hopkins' charmingly rambling introduction to the goodnight-folks country-esque stroll of "Heat of the Desert" rounds out the album nicely.

Gloria Deluxe is not the kind of band who's ever going to be hip enough for the Pitchfork crowd to take notice, but isn't it nice to know that there exists at least one or two bands off our radar, in the vast music subcontinent, that don't suck?

-Nick Mirov