For someone so legendarily shy of publicity, hiding her true visage behind wigs, often getting bolshy with journos who have had the temerity to, y�know, ask questions, it seems strange that Stockholm native Stina Nordenstam sings her songs in English. Why sing in a language that�s not your first unless it�s part of a concerted effort to maximise your audience? But whether her difficult persona is due to artful contrivance or a natural suspicion of the media, she does make exceedingly good records, and this could well be her best yet.

Musically, her approach has changed over the years, and 'The World Is Saved' finds her far away from both the jazz-lite of 1991�s 'Memories Of A Colour', or the discordant guitar scratchings of 1996�s 'Dynamite', but in a strange and sad place somewhere in-between. Vibraphones dance with guitars, keyboards flirt with double bass and sparse, ambient percussion, lonely horns and woodwind rub up against chamber strings. In all there are fourteen musicians playing on the album, and it takes a lot of effort to make that sound intimate. Which it does: startlingly, movingly, thrillingly so, like that liberating yet claustrophobic moment when your new lover tells you their first secret.

It�s not as wilfully experimental as some of her previous outings, but that doesn�t mean the wig-wearing witch of weird has gone soft on us. The sound may be slicker and more assured, but at the heart of virtually all the songs is emotional pain, which she evokes like an old friend. The dismembered relationships and reluctant martyrs of her songs are rendered with disquieting intimacy by that trademark strange-little-girl voice, at once fragile and distant, yet able to cross oceans of melancholy. But quietly, very quietly - this is a performance best appreciated alone.

This record is beautiful, strange, scary and spellbinding, pretty much all at once. It won�t make your world a more comfortable place, but it will make it a better one.