The brilliantly inventive Dave Malloy shares a new song cycle about “love, death and whiskey”

Dave Malloy’s theater songs make you blue like the sky: sad but high. Listening to his brand of emo-pop regret laced with cosmic hope, it’s like you’re watching a spectacular sunrise after a night of whiskey and lame flirting. Which is what might actually happen to you with his semistaged concept album, Ghost Quartet. First, they pass out free Jack Daniel’s. Second, they invite you to join them at a Bushwick bar after four “sides” and 23 songs that weave a drunken path through a forest of fragments (Scheherazade, Poe and the 2012 New York Post photo of a man about to be killed by a subway train). There’s not a linear story to follow, but the material coheres on a rich, intuitive level.