I sometimes wonder what it must be like to have a voice, the kind that changes the weather in a room and makes you feel conspicuous singing “Happy Birthday.” Meernaa’s Carly Bond has one, a subtle showstopper with woodwind’s suedey richness, a way of coaxing the essence out of a note, and a hazy sort of longing shared by Sade, Norah Jones, and Danielle Haim. It’s one of absolute composure, near-calligraphic precision—making it a great foil for the gripping instability of Bond’s lyrics. On Methuselah, the Oakland songwriter is ceaselessly flung out of the present as she worries at memories and tries painstakingly to calibrate the future. “I keep wading through the tall grasses of my mind,” she sings, as her attempts to remain in the moment prove futile.

At any rate, she has a band who can hold her anxieties, a wrecking crew with Muscle Shoals and Spacebomb in their DNA and a knack for drowsy luxury. Just as Bond gets “caught in a memory” on opener “A Promise,” pedal steel and the golden sound of Hammond organ float her reveries downstream. “Black Horse’s Mane” ignites Bond’s “fuck it” seething with one of the record’s sparsely deployed blasts of squall. Methuselah strips back the Jean-Claude Vannierisms and bossa nova diversions of 2023’s So Far So Good for a more focused vintage soul sound—one it shares with Natalie Prass and Bedouine—but it rarely sets the dials to “sophisticated” and leaves it there, as lesser pastiches do.

Most songs introduce some new kind of shade within the record’s rubric rather than pulling from all over. It makes for a subtler, more alert kind of listen. The waltzing “Twilight” is gorgeous k.d. lang-style torch song, although Bond’s longing is aimed inward, at reconciling with the worried, “welcome stranger” that she knows is just herself in another light. Tellingly, those internal negotiations are more convincing than the few direct moments of ardor: “A Little Honey” is kinda cheesy, a sensual plea “to feel good sometimes” that lets pedal steel and organ do all the work—they practically wink with suggestion—but “Make It Rain,” not a million miles apart, brings a lovely swoon to Bond’s attempts to get ahold of herself. The humid atmosphere casts images of a wet weekend indoors, the windows fogged up, as you promise yourself, again, that from Monday, things are gonna change.

Maybe it’s just personal preference, being allergic to most music with a sniff of costume drama around it, but the best moments of Methuselah come when Bond and the band rough up the upholstery a little. The Southern soul of “Cluttered Table” builds anxiously in its confrontation of a timewaster then winds up scarred by distortion anyway; “Time and Time Again” is a classic easy rocker full of joy and trepidation that climaxes in a moment of pure rom-com glee. Bond exclaims, over and over, “It’s you, baby! It’s you! It’s you!” as if dumbstruck by the truth of her feelings. You picture our heroine pointing and yelling at a bemused lover who’s been hiding in plain sight all along, probably in a crowded gallery, nary a care for what anyone else might think.

This sort of finely tooled soul is a tough realm to work in, given the towering stature of the genre’s greatest songs. “Time and Time Again” gets closest to those heights, but “Bells” gets closest to something of Bond’s own. All quiet storm, teardrop strings, and crushed clatter, she sings about the steady voice that “comes ringing right through me” to offer her salvation in lonely moments. Here her own singing is little more than a mumble, parched by desperation. It’s another voice that shines through: economical, intuitive, and confident enough to let the writing do the talking.