Upon its release, the debut album from The Mynabirds received a rave review from Christianity Today — not just a good review, but a perfect, five-star score. Not long thereafter, the album received an 8.0 out of 10 from the indie tastemakers at Pitchfork. Individually, both of these scores might accurately be termed pretty darn good — especially for a new band who released their first record with relatively little hype preceding it — but taken together, it’s something of a coup; who else this side of Sufjan Stevens has garnered such glowing accolades from these two, wildly different critical organizations?

It seems almost baffling at first — and then you here the music. The Mynabirds, voiced by singer/songwriter Laura Burhenn, and produced by indie stalwart Richard Swift, take their name from a quasi-legendary, early ’60s group that featured a then-unknown Neil Young finding inspiration in old gospel and early R&B music. They never released an album, and at this point, they basically don’t need to; Burhenn channels the spirit that you can pretty much imagine flowing through such a group, and What We Lose in the Fire We Gain in the Flood is an album of magical contradictions. It is at once sepia-toned and in-the-moment, sounding like it could find its place in a church or a dingy, edge-of-town bar.

Burhenn isn’t the first indie songstress in recent memory to mine this particular vein of blue-eyed soul, with heavy doses of rock and country. Specifically, it calls to mind Jenny Lewis, and, even more so, the Cat Power of The Greatest and Jukebox, but if these comparisons are already coming clichés in talking about The Mynabirds’ music, they fail to do justice to the singular voice she brings to these songs. There’s a golden-age glow here, a soulful sway and an elegant, emotionally direct simplicity that makes them sound like they could be long lost standards, and yet the singing and playing and writing are all vital enough that they never sound like they’re aping a particular artist or era.

This is sterling songcraft, music that is inspired by but not bound to tradition. Consider how ably Burnhenn evokes sadness in the sophisticated, vaguely Laurel Canyon-ish pop of “LA Rain,” how she builds upon the steadily pulsing backbeat of “Wash it Out” into an incredible moment of catharsis, how “Let the Record Go” weds righteous anger to a vengeful rock and roll rhythm, how “We Made a Mountain” conjures both vintage R&B and swaying gospel.

Oh yeah, the church stuff. This is hardly sacred music — its romantic anguish is too down-and-dirty, its white-soul grit too pronounced — but it is music for the soul, not just because of Burnhenn’s truly powerhouse vocal performance, equally suited for the quieter torch songs and the gospel belters, but for how it speaks to the possibilities of newness, of rebirth in the midst of devastation that are invoked in the album title; the songs aren’t directly religious in their connotations (though there are some biblical metaphors throughout) so much as they’re evocative, suggestive of matters not just of the heart, but of the spirit as well — as if Burnhenn is not just interested in chronicling the material stuff of a broken heart, but the mysterious ways that lie just behind it.