Maria McKee’s first studio album in seven years is also her first release on her own label. Those years have not been idly spent. McKee has defied the odds and escaped the bonds of her Geffen contract and now has sole control over her material. Thus, we can be assured we are hearing unadulterated McKee on her new album High Dive.

Horns, strings, and a full rock band back her up, spoiling any hopes that this will sound like her last album, the masterful Life is Sweet—a rock record that managed to be both blisteringly loud and yet intimate, secretive, and poetic. High Dive is big, big, big. So big, in fact, that her voice is often forced to share the spotlight with full-on orchestration, careening vocal harmonies, and sparring levels of instrumentation.

The album may disorient those Lone Justice fans who thought they had McKee figured out. They are probably here expecting the “alt-country” of You Gotta Sin to Get Saved or the U2-level rock and roll of those early band days. I was hoping for a little more of the Nirvana-like energy and guitar-driven ambition of Life is Sweet, which was for me a revelation, by far my favorite album of her career. It felt like a sort of artistic declaration of independence. Thus, I was bewildered, as I'm sure others will be, by this array of flamboyant showtunes.

Yes, showtunes.

If Maria McKee ever wrote a big brash Broadway musical, it would probably sound a lot like this. She’s more Judy Garland here than Janis Joplin, more Bette Midler than Bowie. Oh, Bowie’s there, alright—“Be My Joy” reminds me of the White Duke’s “Major Tom”-era, and there are echoes of big-noise rock like the Who and even Queen. But each song draws us in, pushes us back, spins us around, and leaves us wondering what happened. One moment she’s solo up on a platform (the title song), and the next she’s front and center in an elaborate vocal dance number (“Love Doesn’t Love”) that borders on disco. You can picture her introducing characters, her wrist held melodramatically to her brow, as she bemoans each one of her failed companions in the showstopping "My Friend Foe."

It should come as no surprise that she spent some time in Ireland doing cabaret and fusing rock with theater with other artists like Bono’s famously over-the-top colleague Gavin Friday. McKee has said that she intended to pursue music and theater at Julliard before forming Lone Justice made her a star. It shows.

Only a few of the songs on High Dive resemble her earlier work—the album opening “To the Open Spaces”, the unnecessary repeat of the last album’s title track “Life is Sweet”, the sensational pop-rocker “In Your Constellation”, and the quieter closing number “Worry Birds.” On the others, she often layers her voice to create a whole chorus. A whole horn section works overtime. And a small army of guitars as support rather than focus. In the center stands Maria, wrapped in layers of her own voice, each one trying to out-sing the wall of sound behind her. The production is sometimes so overcrowded it’s hard to know where our focus should lie.

It’s a complicated record, dense with McKee’s typically challenging abstract lyrics.

“To the Open Spaces” is a McKee version of “Lovers in a Dangerous Time”, expressing the rush lovers feel when they jump in the car and leave everything behind. The huge sound of the song makes it clear that there are no open spaces Maria’s voice cannot fill up.

This is followed by the saxophone-laced rock anthem “Be My Joy”, an unnerving song of romantic obsession that sounds anything but joyful… it sounds more desperate, a case of emotional dependency waiting to happen. Whoever she’s singing to is likely to be frightened away instead of seduced.

Where else can I reach you, baby
What if you're not there, baby
Do you like my hair, baby
Where else can I reach you, baby
You've made me so happy, baby
Have I told you that?

The song never gives any indication that she finds comfort from anything other than human connection, whereas songs in the past carried a sense of the “other”, an undercurrent of prayer and spiritual communion.

McKee says in the new issue of “No Depression” that “Life is Sweet” is her favorite of the songs she’s written. She must meant it: Here it is again. But I found it to be almost the weakest song on her last album. Although the music is big, anthemic, cathartic, McKee fails to offer any source of real encouragement or hope to all of the troubled characters she describes. She tells the girl “with voices in her head”, “You’re not crazy / You’re just smarter than the rest of them.” She tells the boy with a broken heart, “It won’t be the first time / and they don’t make a cure for that.” Her only suggestion is to turn the bitter into art, into a story or a song. Where did the rumors of glory and grace, so prevalent in her best work, go?

One of the highlights, “High Dive” gives us a a breather. It’s lighter, quieter, more introspective, and it features a lilting brass line and a clearly autobiographical lyric about disillusionment and past failures. It could be a reference to her career, surrounded by praise, predictions, and promises of a worldly success that never came. Now she struggles with disillusionment.

Believin' in something
Courageous and crazy
Nothing could phase me
'till I hit the pavement
And now it's back to school
Ready to play the fool
'Cause I took a high dive into an empty pool

As she considers things she might have done, the alternatives to failure seem in retrospect to be positively beastly:

Everything planned out
None of it panned out
I could have mauled it
Straight to the top
If I kept my fangs out

The song wraps up with the most hopeful sentiment on the record, as simple assertion of faith:

What'll I tell my friends
I'll get up and try again
And I'll take a high dive
Someday I'll never land

You’ve got to give it to McKee that she never sings anything without sounding like she means it with all her heart.

It’s that very whole-heartedness that makes her music challenging and, in this case, completely exhausting. Almost every song builds to a huge tempest of sound and several layers of McKee’s full-throated declarations. The only time she takes the lead with one of the gloriously erratic, buzz-saw guitar solos that burned through Life is Sweet comes during “In Your Constellation”, my favorite track.

That sense of hope and spiritual assurance seems lacking throughout. Perhaps she is choosing to point the way to hope by emphasizing its absence in merely worldly exchanges. But some of these songs become desperately dark. “We Pair Off”, one of the most inspired tracks on the album, paints life as a chaos of fragmentary beings finding and consoling each other, living wasted lives. The refrain is as dispiriting as anything she has ever sung:

Wasted (what tough way we learn)
Wasted (even the space we leave is barren)
Wasted, shapeless
And we pair off, and we pair off

Love is clearly essential to these characters, but it’s also elusive, wearing ragged those who set their minds on chasing it down. At times, she is so full of the euphoria of love that her voice sounds on the verge of disintegration; at others, she sings through tears. In a way, it’s inspiring that she picks herself up and keeps going through all of these different stories of heartbreak.

Making things even harder to swallow, Jim Akin's production upsets any sense of a live performance. Akin, McKee’s husband, arranges the multitudinous layers of sound in a way that strikes the ear as artificial. This works fine for Radiohead, who are trying to create a new kind of blatantly “produced” sound, but for someone trying to create a more organic style and the illusion of a “stage”, this excessive layering seems counterproductive.

Clearly, McKee is at the top of her talents when it comes to composing complex and unpredictable music. She sings, “I've been careful just trying to get it right ... I am full of grand ideas / I've been perfecting them for years…” High Dive is not a failure by any means; it represents a visionary artist slashing her way into new territory, displaying techniques learned from a variety of influences that echo even from the distant past.

But I am still uncomfortable with the record. I have always found her work compelling, inspiring, and a couple of her albums—Shelter and Life is Sweet—have deeply moved me. But I was also an enthusiastic fan of Sinead O’Connor’s albums until the intensity of her tantrums began to feel self-indulgent, and the production and stylistic “costume changes” (especially on Faith and Courage) ruined the intimacy, coherence, and immediacy of her work. McKee has shown time and time again that she can hold her own with a large band and an outrageous backdrop. But I would be hard pressed to think of a performer who is more compelling when she stands alone, with a guitar, singing up-close and personal. And I miss that Maria McKee.

I’m glad to read in recent interviews that High Dive has offered Maria her first opportunity for complete control of her work. She’s doing what she wants to do. I certainly hope she finds an audience that understands it, appreciates it, and benefits from it. (Just to be fair, the album is connecting with some music buffs whose opinions I highly respect—like Thom Jurek. You can look up his rave review for High Dive at www.allmusic.com.) I would never steer people away from McKee—she is so honest, ambitious, and bold that she's essential in this contemporary music scene so fraught with artificiality and sentimentality. Don’t count me as one of those “Worry Birds” that “tug at [her] hair” and “tell [her she’s] ugly.” (Au contraire—I’ve long considered Maria to be the most beautiful lead singer on the planet!)

But to be totally honest, I feel as if a good friend has suddenly been transformed into something disconnected from me. I am dismayed to find this record so alienating, noisy, difficult, and even bewildering. After more than a month of looking for a way into the inner world of High Dive, I’ve gone back to Life is Sweet, which has been sweet relief.