“Comfort of Strangers,” the title to the new album by vaguely alternative British singer Beth Orton, isn’t exactly right. “Comfort to Strangers” would be better: While the album may satisfy some longtime fans, it will sound even better to those who’ve never cared much for her past work. (I count myself in the latter group.)

Orton emerged in the mid- to late 1990s, a time of flux and false starts in pop music; alt-rock had run its course, and hip-hop hadn’t emerged fully to take its place. She was associated with two of the period’s least appealing movements: British electronica and Lilith Fair-style neo-folk. Both were briefly fashionable, even flirting with crossover success, but soon faded into obsolescence.

Orton’s innovation was to combine the two. Beginning with “Trailer Park,” her breakout 1996 LP, she blended trip-hop beats with acoustic guitar, creating an unholy hybrid sometimes referred to as “ambient folk.” It was the worst of both worlds: the blandest electronic textures and coffeehouse folk neutered of all raw emotional intensity. Her saving grace was her voice: sometimes capricious and bluesy, like a sultrier Joni Mitchell, sometimes flat and lightly accented.

Her sound wasn’t mercurial so much as chameleonic; she responded to and mimicked the colors of her collaborators. Orton was discovered by British electronic superproducer William Orbit (of Madonna “Ray of Light” fame) and first appeared in a one-off collaboration with him called Spill. She went on to work with such revered knobtwiddlers as the Chemical Brothers and Andrew Weatherall, as well as alt-country wunderkind Ryan Adams, and was always the perfect foil for their distinctive sounds.

The only evidence of this past on “Comfort of Strangers” is the total avoidance of it. The music is intimate, organic, a little reckless, and determinedly analog. Most of the songs are constructed from the sturdy stuff of piano, drums, and upright bass, with occasional bits of guitar and handclaps thrown in. Oddly, the most noticeable instrument is the drums, played by indie journeyman Tim Barnes (Silver Jews, Wilco). It’s not that they’re obtrusive – the shivering cymbals and rattling beats are actually quite subtle – it’s just that they’ve so rarely been associated with Orton’s voice before. In the past, Orton has sounded like she’s being beamed in from some astral plane. Now it’s as though she’s playing with a three-piece band in the same room as you.

The album opens with “Worms,” a song that bears more than a passing resemblance to Fiona Apple’s recent work. Simple and rhythmic, it builds on an iambic piano and drum line. Orton plays against it with world-weary sass; she’s “your apple-eating heathen, your rib-stealing Eve.” As the song builds, her lines become more angular, halting and starting and running on very much in the style of Ms. Apple. But that’s where the likeness ends; from there she goes on to find her own sound.

Well, not her own sound exactly, but a lovely and unfamiliar one anyway. Here again, it owes to the work of a producer – in this case Jim O’Rourke, a man generally known for noise projects (until recently he was a member of Sonic Youth) and for salvaging Wilco’s “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.” But “Comfort of Strangers” is more closely related to another, lesser known O’Rourke obsession: the music of the forgotten (until recently) 1970s folk-rock singer Judee Sill.

O’Rourke mixed the 2005 release of Sill’s third album, “Dreams Come True”(the songs were unfinished at her death in 1974), and his familiarity with the inner workings of her sound shows all through this album: in the jovial, naturalistic arrangements, the richness of sound. The singers’ voices are quite different – Sill’s is higher, more translucent – but O’Rourke situates them similarly in the songs. On the galloping “Rectify,” the beautifully cluttered “Shopping Trolley,” and the Janis Joplin-like “Heart of Soul,” Orton’s singing nestles in with the instruments, but is never crowded by them.

The sound and delivery are so compelling that it takes a while to notice just how hackneyed the lyrics are. With lines like “my bed is as I made it / just not what went between,” you give her the benefit of the doubt. So too with opacities like “an illusion was hope born from fear.” But once you start listening for them, metaphors break down and cliches pile up to reach new heights of banality. “Always there are more peaks to climb / it really seems there is no finishing line” is a representative example. But this is mostly a quibble, a result of the fact that the music is good enough to warrant such scrutiny.