According to legend, Christina Courtin is the new Norah Jones, which basically means she's a mild-mannered, New York-based chanteuse whose debut disc is prone to outbreaks of winsome country-jazz. A Juilliard-trained violinist with a fondness for Led Zeppelin, Courtin is a more eccentric song stylist than Jones, but she's less quirky than her next natural analog, Regina Spektor, who's been known to make dolphin noises in songs that aren't necessarily about dolphins.
Courtin's self-titled debut is mercilessly charming, a conflation of sweet and sad that manages the neat (and difficult) trick of being endlessly effervescent without inducing tooth decay. "Foreign Country" is its best moment, a weightless bit of meringue that sounds like the happiest not-quite-love song of the year.
The song is twinkly, jaunty and blithe; if it were any airier, it would ascend to the heavens of its own accord, like an unmoored helium balloon. Based on the slenderest, most worn-out of premises — Do you like me? How much? — it's yelpy and adorable and suggests an intriguing future for Courtin, who tosses off the song's central question ("If I was a foreign country / would you come visit me?") while sounding as if she weren't the slightest bit concerned with the answer.
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