Attention would-be knaves, suitors, swains, and fuck toys: If you're trying to get on a chick's good side, regaling her with topless pictures of your ex-girlfriend ain't the way to do it. It's as effective a strategy as whipping it (yes, THAT 'it') out unannounced and uninvited. Not only does it diminish your chances of squiring a piece a millionfold or so, you risk sending a perfectly good straight girl barreling down the Sapphic path, never to return. Worse yet, you could find yourself immortalized in song as a deadbeat asshole who puts the dumb in dumbstick, like Mary Timony did on "Blood Tree." Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned -- especially when titillating shots of her man's onetime mattress-mambo partner figure into the equation. "Isn't that funny?" Timony giggles in disbelief, a sprightly wood nymph with a girlish voice and frequent laugh. "I thought it was pretty insensitive." You'd hardly expect someone who fronted a band who built their career on sonic narcolepsy -- Valium rock -- to brim with such bubbly energy, but there's magic on her side. Or, as the case may be, magick. Not since Tori Amos built her fairie ring have supernatural creatures figured so prominently on an album as they do on Timony's new one, The Golden Dove (Matador). And we're not talking big bad wolves in the forest: Olde Worlde figures juxtapose with modern imagery, ghosts and dryads jibing with Jesus freaks and the fucked-up guy upstairs. Under the quaint guise of Ms. Charming Melodee, Timony leads a merry menagerie of mythical creatures and fanciful beings -- ants dancing in line, snakes in the sky, singing peacocks -- traipsing through her trippy world like Alice in Wonderland. As the Walrus so famously announced in that beloved tome, "the time has come to talk of many things." Goo-goo-ga-joob.

"I guess a lot of the lyrics have images in them that are kind of like metaphors to me," Timony ruminates. "Like an owl represents something ... I guess the owl's probably me. Like the raven is depression. They're all coded. All the animals usually represent an emotional part of me or someone else. I like doing that because it's more satisfying to me. I think a lot of the images come from cultural stuff, like old folk songs or stuff I heard as a kid."

Though The Golden Dove reeks of bucolic bedtime-story bliss at first listen (and glance), its airy fairy-tale sweetness and light rapidly darken into hallucinogenic visions, harrowing scenes of disturbing violence and apocalyptic premonition. Beneath Timony's delicate countenance lies an imagination sharp enough to draw blood; if she's not locked in a room with a swarm of deranged madmen, she's getting strangled on the banks of a river or plummeting down a poisoned well. While the songs piece together neatly like a mosaic, she's dubious about calling it a concept album. "I wouldn't call it a concept album only because when I think of a concept album I think of Gentle Giant or something," Timony explains. "I didn't have some sort of concept I started with. They all fit together pretty well 'cause they were written around the same time in my life or whatever."

For all its magick, melodee and mythical mysticism, The Golden Dove is firmly grounded in modern reality. "It all has to do with not the actual songwriting but the process of recording to me," Timony says of the magical mystery tour that began not on the guitar, but on the piano. "I like playing the piano because I never took piano lessons really, and that makes it more of a fresh perspective on things when I play it," she says. "I also like it 'cause you can really see what you're doing. I like to play single-note melodies rather than chords, usually. Even on the guitar, I generally end up playing melodies that kind of interweave together, and on the piano that's much more of an easy thing to do."

Even though the album wedges distinctly baroque chamber-rock epistles like "Look a Ghost in the Eye" and "Magic Power" alongside folkier outings like "Dryad and the Mule," it's still being tagged with the handle that's replaced 'emo' as the irritating buzzword du jour: prog. "Maybe there's a Helium record that was kind of like that. I don't think of myself that way, but I don't have any control over what people say. I think you could call some of Ash's (Bowie, her Helium bandmate) music prog-rock-- I think maybe that's where it came from." (Bowie's since relocated to the West Coast, resurfaced under under the nom de song Libraness, released a sonic atrocity called Yesterday ... And Tomorrow's Shells in 2000 and promptly vanished into thin air.) Although he guested on Timony's solo debut, Mountains alongside the Sea and Cake's John McEntire, he's notably absent on The Golden Dove. Stepping in to replace him are drummer and percussionist Miguel Urbiztondo, who's appeared on several Cracker outings; bassist/trumpeter Jeff Goddard, who's logged studio time with the Ivory Coast and Come; and cellist Amy Domingues, who's worked with Fugazi, Jets to Brazil and Edith Frost. Even though it's more of a one-woman effort than Mountains, Timony did split production duties with Sparklehorse mainman Mark Linkous and Al Weatherhead, who twiddled the knobs on Clem Snide's Ghost of Fashion LP.

"It was the best recording experience I'd ever had, with Al Weatherhead. He was amazing," Timony enthuses. "That was the best part for me, just working with someone who was totally competent and really talented. I'm not sure how much it had to do with just our connection being good, although that was good too, but it really was just that he's a great engineer and producer. He's both really artistic and really technical. That's kind of rare to find someone who's an engineer who's like that, I've found. So I'm really psyched that I've met him." And even though the album was halfway to completion by the time Linkous entered the picture, "he added some overdubs, like keyboard overdubs and synthesizer sounds, and he had some good suggestions. There are actually a bunch of songs that didn't end up on the record. And then there were songs that I didn't even end up recording. So those were more challenging. When you work harder on something, sometimes it doesn't come out as well. I might remix them later or something."

And her "Blood Tree" target? "I'll probably never talk to him again."

Unless, of course, he burns those pictures.

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