Thomas Dybdahl

For most of the last decade Thomas Dybdahl has been the singer-songwriter equivalent of a connoisseur's blend: complex but mellow, faintly exotic, so appreciably good that his fans could feel ambivalent about spreading the word. That was true in the United States, at least, not in Mr. Dybdahl's native Norway, where he's famous. "Songs" (Strange Cargo) is his first album to see release here, and it's perhaps best described as a greatest-hits compilation liberated from the pressure of, you know, hits. Its track listing resembles what you might hear from Mr. Dybdahl in concert: the first three songs from his fine 2002 debut and later highlights like "Cecilia" and "Don't Lose Yourself," which propose a haunted and bittersweet reassurance. Mr. Dybdahl sings in a breathy baritone and a soft but penetrating falsetto — Bon Iver obsessives, take note — and his songwriting rests on simple structures with flourishes of shrewd orchestration. He's fastidious but not without soul or whimsy, as he shows in "All's Not Lost," one of the oldest songs here, a hymn of romantic awakening tinged with the bleary mortification of a hangover.