Amy Bezunartea’s New Villain (Kaim Records) is a promising album. It reveals a voice confident enough to pare down the instrumental backing to the bone. Unfortunately, the songs, by and large, don’t hold up to the attention of that transparency.

The lyrical mood throughout the record is passive. Begging and questioning, the point-of-view surveys the ruins of something never defined. This is made most obvious on the whispered piano ballad, “Wreckage,” where Bezunartea intones, “All this wreckage, but it’s dressed right. All this niceness, it’s a half-life.” Elsewhere, she elaborates, “Tell me something, I’m begging you,” (“Friends Again”), “You don’t have to want it so bad… don’t have to be mean, don’t have to be mad,” (”Those People”), and “I want to, but I can’t just put it down and leave,” (“Nothing Goes Away”). When she experiments with heightened language, often it just feels disjointed and grasping, as on “Call On Me,” with its mouthful, “You can’t be inoculated. I’m a super-bug emancipated.” These lyrics are delivered with a rhythmic sensibility that elongates and shortens lines in surprising ways, but that’s done so often it withers into gimmicky affect.

The clean, slow melodic material could create an interesting tension with the subject matter, but through 10 mostly similar songs, it all turns gray. Silences never gain the tension they seem to seek, and the more heavily orchestrated (and I use that term loosely) songs don’t often add much. The church organ and lackadaisical drums on “Friends Again,” the circular guitar line and gauzy harmonies on “Those People,” and the thick bass on “Call On Me” keep the melody trapped in their gravity without that tension ever blossoming.

New Villain is so dry, so sparse, and so safe that when dissonance or a varied approach surface it feels like stumbling on an oasis. The title track’s ringing guitar noise verges on a squeak, and Bezunartea’s sultry whisper alludes to “(making) a new world with your weakness in mind” while echoing across the landscape. “Oh, the Things a Girl Must Do” also turns its sparseness into an asset, as shown in the silence between its guitar notes and the way Bezunartea’s voice drifts ahead and hangs over the yawning chasm as she puts forth lines like, “Everyone’s having fun. When it’s over you can tell they all want the pussy, but they don’t like the smell,” which recall the blunt language of Marge Piercey and Marilyn Hacker. If there were more of those moments on New Villain, it would be a stronger record and one that lingered with the listener. As it stands, we’re left with a collection of sonic snapshots that hint at a rich, dark interior life, but settle for being indistinct instead of mysterious.