This Ethiopia-born, Finland-raised artist makes music that's bewitching and haunting, the songs of a soul older than her 23 years. The chilling effect of Wagner’s lovely, trance-like voice (stripped of emotion while describing a dying lover’s cold limbs or the devil's red eyes) is accompanied by spare, blues–inspired acoustic guitar picking; it's powerfully evocative. Wagner’s tales are both lulling and harrowing; they feel as if the souls of Leonard Cohen, Robert Johnson, and PJ Harvey have all left their vessels (well, one has been long vacated) and planted themselves inside Wagner for a visit. “When they find me in the river/tell my mother I was a good boy,” she intones gently on “Joe,” whose subject describes feeling “light as a leaf/an angel holding hands with me” as he stares down his imminent death. Wagner wrote the brooding “To the Bone” as a teenager in Finland: “Your love drags me down/like the clothes when you swim/down, deeper down/like the roots of old trees.” Breathtakingly beautiful and admirably outré, Wagner's an artist in the best sense of the word