Forty-four years after her first and only previous album, 1970’s Parallelograms, Linda Perhacs—a singer/songwriter and dental hygienist from Woodland Hills, Calif.—is back with the mesmerizing astral folk of 2014’s The Soul of All Natural Things. Modern avant-garde folkies such as Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom sang her praises to a new generation, and that (along with having the Swedish death-metal band Opeth and Daft Punk covering her songs) prompted Perhacs’ unlikely re-emergence in the music world at age 70. Yet despite her years of musical inactivity, Perhacs still has an angelic voice and the songwriting prowess of someone who’d been working the entire time. Help from Ramona Gonzalez (a singer/songwriter who goes by the alias Nite Jewel) and fellow L.A.-based singer/songwriter Julia Holter turn the album into a fascinating exploration of a forever-hopeful soul. From the sweet simplicity of “River of God,” “Daybreak," and “Freely” to the spaced-out videogame effects and horn charts of the aptly titled “Intensity,” Natural Things carves out its own idiosyncratically beautiful territory.