At different times, autumn can be the most beautiful and the most melancholy of all seasons.

And so it goes for Olenka Krakus and her band, the Autumn Lovers, whose particular brand of balladry treads that line between elegance and sorrow throughout her self-titled debut.

"I don't shy away from the fact that I have experienced melancholy over the majority of my life," says Krakus, who left communist Poland as a child for the greener pastures of British Columbia and now southern Ontario.

"I think artists develop a certain hypersensitivity to the human experience through their own experiences of disappointment and pain. But socially, our culture has a lot of ailments, and alienation is one of them, and alienation is an intense form of melancholy. So, I see it everywhere. At that level, it becomes important for me to explore why that's happening en masse in our culture, and that's where the music starts to get a little more political, even though the sentiment is there."

That sentiment laces the album's 11 tracks, all eastern European-tinged folk ballads recorded in intimate studio settings, with arrangements that veer gracefully between spare acoustic meditations and lush orchestrations of strings, accordion and textured vocal harmonies.

The contradiction is not lost on Olenka and the Autumn Lovers, who draw their inspiration from, among other things, "the most contradictory of seasons."

"All of the leaves are turning and the colours are vibrant. You can't help from feeling inspired," says Krakus. "But at the same time, that beauty that is so fleeting is itself an expression of pain, because the trees are dying, and they're closing themselves off from the encroaching harsh winter. So all of the beauty that we react to are expressions of pain and suffering."

Krakus' lyrics exude that same poetic imagery, drawn from her literary background, with a political bent deeply rooted in her past.

"If you read a variety of literature, you realize that most human writing negotiates human suffering and experiences of happiness," says Krakus.

"I try to mine that from the communist experience that I recall from my childhood, then I try to look at that from a North American perspective, because there are lots of people who feel alienated and unhappy and oppressed in our culture who don't experience explicitly, as a communist regime might impose oppression on its people, but it still exists. So when my writing gets more political, it's certainly from an attempt to explore those ideas."