Jessica Jalbert is a sorceress, but you shouldn’t feel out of the loop if you’ve never heard the name. Doing a little research, one finds that Jalbert released an overlooked gem, Brother Loyola, under her own name some years back. It’s full of heartfelt folk sprung from the imagination of an artist confined to a remote, yet deeply beautiful part of the world, Edmonton, Alberta. But such isolation truly defines Faith Healer, her latest project with friend Renny Wilson.

Cosmic Troubles (Mint Records) is an album of lazily spun modernism, weighted in timeless influences and prismatic space. The first thing you’ll notice is the effervescence of the lead single “Again,” with its kaleidoscopic psych-lite as played on guitars plucked as if lifted from Fairport Convention tablature or Lilys records from the mid-90s. It’s a rummage, but it all seems to fall in place magically. Meanwhile, Jalbert sing-speaks as a Nico-esque chanteuse. The opener, “Acid,” is “Sweet Jane” were it conceived in a smoke-filled candy store, and the title track could be “All Tomorrow’s Parties” had Os Mutantes written it first.

Neither space-aged nor Spiritualized, Faith Healer, despite the ill-conceived name (there’s of of course the ’90s band from Britain, Th’ Faith Healers), inhabits ’70s soft-rock with enough tentacles to show Jalbert has musical depth and her fingers on a little bit of everything in the room. “No Car,” the very next track, simmers in farfisa flashbacks and girl-group grunge imbued with a flippancy that doesn’t get in the way. Though not everything here is triumphant, there are certainly enough sonic diversions spliced throughout that one gets the impression Jalbert was wide-eyed in the studio, which allows Cosmic Troubles an unpredictability that belies its general sameness at times. Here is a great album for long car drives to nowhere in particular.