Indie popsters My Brightest Diamond shine on latest record

Shara Nova is trying to get to the chorus.

“I don’t really need to look / Very much further / I don’t wanna have to go / Where you don’t follow,” she sings into the phone, her voice mellifluous and warm, as if exhaled from satin-lined lungs.

Nova is searching for the name of a Whitney Houston tune, attempting to jog her memory with an impromptu rendition of the hit from the “Bodyguard” soundtrack.

“I have nothing / Nothing! / Nothing! If I don’t have you-oo-oo,” she continues, nailing its title eventually.

If it weren’t for the number in question, Nova might not be here right now, talking up her sixth album, “A Million and One,” released under the banner of her indie chamber-pop project, My Brightest Diamond.

“I was obsessed with that song,” the 44-year-old says, recalling her origins as a working musician in the early ’90s. “I was singing in this cover band, I wanted to sing that song, and they wouldn’t do it. That’s exactly what made me say, ‘I’m going to go learn how to play guitar and I’m going to learn how to play my own songs. That’s what made me start writing tunes.”

And what tunes they are: emotive, shape-shifting, classically informed, elaborately arranged in some cases, austerely appointed with electronic pulses in others.

In a way, Nova was born to sing them.

From church pews to concert halls

Nova’s father was a pastor and church choir director, her mom played piano and organ, her grandfather was skilled at guitar, her grandmother sang and one of her uncles was a world-class pianist.

But her evangelical upbringing also came with restrictions.

One of them?

No dancing.

So when Nova went away to the University of North Texas, pursuing a vocal degree, she cut loose, only to find that doing so cut both ways for her.

“I was singing in a punk band, and there was this one particular night where I was dancing and singing and people started whistling,” Nova recalls. “It made me so uncomfortable that I decided from that night forward that I wouldn’t dance and sing, because I wanted to be respected and I wanted to be taken seriously as a musician.

“Of course, now I know that those things are not mutually exclusive,” she adds, “but at the time, they really were for me. I think with music-making, a lot of the records have been a recovery of the body, a recovery of one’s relationship to the body.”

Nova directly addresses as much on “It’s Me on the Dance Floor,” a whooping-voiced, electro-pop slow simmer that opens “A Million and One.”

“It’s me I been looking for,” Nova sings, spelling out of the album’s central themes: the search for one’s true self and the subsequent embracing of what one finds.

Baring her ‘Teeth’

“Million” is a record posited on vulnerability and resolve, Nova’s voice beatific yet firm, like a tire iron wrapped in velvet.

A highlight is “You Wanna See My Teeth,” another song where Nova mines her past to say something about the present, in this case, a rumination on the killing of Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old who was shot to death in Sanford, Florida, in 2012 while walking home from a local convenience store after buying Skittles.

“When I was a teenager, my parents wouldn’t let us have candy, and so I would sneak to the store with my sister and we’d buy candy with our babysitter money,” Nova recalls. “And so this idea of going to the store to buy some Skittles was something that I did as a kid and I have very vivid memories of that. So it’s not only a reflection and a comparison of the difference between us, but also me processing what happened with my own life as well.”

“Teeth” doesn’t belabor its point or hit listeners over the head with a heavy-handed point of view.

Instead, like many of her works, there’s an open-ended feel to it, a pointed desire to leave something up to the listener.

When Nova sings, “No man can confine me / No man can confine me,” at song’s end, it registers as a universal sentiment derived from a specific event.

‘Really, really restrictive’

Perhaps this boundlessness is the lone constant in My Brightest Diamond’s diffuse discography, which stretches from highly orchestrated to marching band-worthy to elegant understatement.

On “Million,” she scales things back a bit, deliberately shoving herself out of her comfort zone.

“For this record, I thought, ‘Well, I’ve constantly fallen in love with these different instrumentalists, so I’m not going to allow myself to use any orchestration at all aside from minimal keyboards and drums, very, very little bass,” Nova explains. “It’s really, really restrictive, and I did it because I wanted to look at song form. I felt like maybe I’d become so enamored with the idea of orchestration that I really need to use the power of limiting the number of instruments and see what kinds of songs would come as a result of that.”

What resulted is perhaps My Brightest Diamond’s most acclaimed album, which has been lauded everywhere from Rolling Stone to NPR to Pitchfork, landing the group an opening slot on Death Cab for Cutie’s current tour, which hits the Hard Rock Hotel on Friday.

It’s been more than a decade since Nova last performed in Vegas. She just hopes to avoid the emergency room this go-round.

“I twisted my knee onstage during the song ‘Magic Rabbit,’ ” Nova recalls of a 2006 gig here. “My bass player used to be a volleyball player and he dared me, ‘You can’t jump as high as me.’ And I was like, ‘Oh yeah?’ So I was trying to jump higher than him in the show. I popped my knee out of joint. I hope I won’t be in the hospital this time.”

Contact Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow @JasonBracelin on Twitter.