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A Fine Frenzy is the musical offering of 21-year-old Alison Sudol, a wan softly melancholy redhead with a wide smile and a look tailor-made for an autumn catalogue. Her debut album, One Cell in the Sea, is 14 songs of alternative pop and indie soul which lifts and rocks the spirit, calling out in hope with a sigh in the heart.

The opening cut, Come On, Come Out, builds with dreamy electronica and insistent keys, “watching the sky, you're watching a painting / coming to life, shifting and shaping / staying inside, it all goes all goes by.” Then comes the rolling piano and keening strings of The Minnow & the Trout, like a Darwinian “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”: “please, I know that we’re different / but we were one cell in the sea in the beginning / and what we’re made of was all the same once / we’re not that different after all.”

You Picked Me swells in full orchestral pop with solid chord progressions and a nostalgic melody like a childhood crush on a swing set: “like an apple on a tree / hiding out behind the leaves / I was difficult to reach / but you picked me.” Rangers strikes a darker tone in the best Watership Down fashion: “and the rangers stream / out of their cabins / they are the hunters, / we are the rabbits / but maybe we don’t want to be found.” Almost Lover is an unabashed blue ballad which might well sidewind its way into top-40 play: “well, I'd never want to see you unhappy / I thought you’d want the same for me.”

Sudol’s self-taught piano style is lyrical, martial, honeyed, sympathetic, like rain drops in a music box, with shades of Philip Glass (who she cites as an important influence, along with C.S. Lewis, Louis Armstrong and Bjork, among others).

The album suffers a little coming around the bend, when the romantic ennui starts to get sticky, like cotton candy on a boardwalk. Tracks 7-11 are fine tunes, but with little to tickle the imagination and inspire the kudos the first half dozen deserve. Still, it’s not hard to imagine some of these songs becoming the be-all, end-all of the post-Dawson’s Creek set.

Things pick up a bit with Near to You, an understated piano ballad with soberly realistic lyrics: “though he's gone / and you are wonderful / it's hard to move on / yet, I'm better near to you.” And even if the message isn’t original, the penultimate Hope for the Hopeless has all the markings of an alternative pop anthem.

There are at least six or seven winners on this CD, which ain’t bad at all for a debut album. If you only bought it for the first six cuts, you’d get your money’s worth. Catch her on tour through August with Rufus Wainwright.