Where the careers of so many Texas singer-songwriters follow a straight path, the artistic progression of Darden Smith fills an ever-widening circle--as the release of his most musically adventurous and ambitiously crafted album to date attests. On this successor to 2002’s Sunflower, which earned the Austin-based artist his strongest critical response in more than a decade, Smith continues to explore the creative synergy of tradition and technology, acoustic and electric, East and West, roots and branches, body and spirit. The result is a song cycle that is as rhythmically insistent as it is disarmingly intimate.