Given his stunning ability to consistently align himself with doomed record labels, it eventually became more expeditious for Michael Knott to start recording and releasing records on his own, distributing them through his website.

Finding Angel was Knott's first L.S.U. record in three years, and it finds him deliberately blurring the boundary between Michael Knott the solo performer and Michael Knott the L.S.U. frontman.

The bulk of the songs on Finding Angel feature only Knott and his battered acoustic guitar, recorded through the internal mike of a cheap portable boom box.

This tactic rubs the sheen clean off the songs, making the otherwise gentle compositions instead sound of one spirit with the fractured visions of Roky Erickson and Daniel Johnston.

Though "Chaser" is Knott's most chilling song since "Bye Bye Colour," most of Finding Angel is given over to ruminations on grace and relief.

"Siren Unseen," with its stop-start cadence and artless lyrics, is fragile in a way Knott's previous high-gloss efforts have routinely bungled.

The chorus of "Stereo/Radio" would have been absurd and gigantic on 16 tracks, but its rough-cut feel instead harks back to the blunted optimism of This Is the Healing.

Sometimes Knott's newfound earnestness is too much to bear: The title track is a groaner of a love song, and "Playing Ground," which in one lyric imagines Jesus in a sandbox, is also a bit too mawkish.

But Knott recovers deftly, letting a flute bleat out like an S.O.S.

distress signal in "Yielding Arms." With Finding Angel, Michael Knott states definitively that L.S.U. records are not defined by volume but by unity of vision.

Slightly fractured, slightly chilling, and ultimately rewarding, Finding Angel is an L.S.U. record in the best sense.