"…a secret weapon” (Jon Garelick, The Arts Fuse)

Call that last move a strategic deployment of a secret weapon. Thompson-King’s background includes a lot of rock, but she also trained as an opera singer. She swoops through the waves of tricky intervals in “Us” and saves Joni Mitchell’s “Amelia” from over-familiarity with just the right emotional heft in her phrasing and diction. (Here, too, credit Hofbauer’s arrangement, with its contrapuntal use of voice and guitar, guitar with bass and cello, and Noah Preminger’s sensitive tenor sax cadenza.) She is given the opportunity to to unleash rock screams on Peter Gabriel’s “Here Comes the Flood.” And she brings the appropriate laid-back cool to the swinging electric jam of Jimi Hendrix’s “Up from the Skies.”