With songs like “Goshen ’97,” “Shut In,” and the colossal “JM,” it’d be easy to mistake former folkie Timothy Showalter as having entered his big-screen, cathartic Americana phase in a way that would make Jim James proud. But there are a lot of layers to the pain that necessitated HEAL — everything from adultery to car accidents to house fires — and Showalter takes all those loose, brief glimpses of synthesizers or fuzzed-out guitars from his previous work and explores them more fully, pushing his sound in a surprising number of directions. Synth-y jams like the title track and “Wait For Love” come off like harrowed psychological exorcisms just the same as those volcanic guitar breaks in “JM.” HEAL has one of those great paradoxes in music — it’s an expansive album musically, but is rooted in all those personal and intimate details that keep big music human. It’s one of the year’s breakthrough albums, and a great one at that. –Ryan [LISTEN]