News of the Universe is a record born of calamity, a work of dark, beautiful psychedelia reflecting guitarist and songwriter Shana Clevelands experience of having her world blown apart by a breast cancer diagnosis just two years after the birth of her son.

Its also a portrait of a band in flux, marking the first appearance for drummer Audrey Johnson and the final ones from longtime members bassist Lena Simon and keyboardist Alice Sandahl, whose contributions add a bittersweet edge to a record that is both elegy for an old world and cosmic road map to a strange new one.

Cleveland, also a writer and painter, has developed into a truly original songwriter with her own canon of haunted psychedelia. Yet if she has spent years writing songs about ghosts, what lurks in the shadows of News of the Universe is n