Warp and Weft –
Laura Veirs
Laura Veirs is now at imminent, Level 5 risk of rendering
herself unclassifiable among musical genres.
There were hints of this threat a few years ago when she released her
excellent album Saltbreakers, but it
is much worse now. Taxonomists are
emptying their fifth and sixth shots and forgetting to tip their
bartenders. Record store staff are
kicking off elongate, snobbish arguments above the background music about where
Veirs’ new CD Warp and Weft might be
filed. (The background music in record
stores for the next few weeks, incidentally, is pretty likely to be Warp and Weft.)
Chaos. Fire and
brimstone falling from the sky. Cats and
dogs, living together. Because
unavoidably, to the enduring reward of all of us, Laura Veirs has proven
incapable of fitting into any mold except her own broken one.
(Also: cue the sound
of dozens of kinda-introspective musicians now pissed that they didn’t think of
working the onomatopoeia of “Weft” into an album title first.)
Here now, a partial list of inappropriate genres for Ms.
Veirs, and for Warp and Weft, with
accompanying parenthetical reasoning for said disqualifications:
Folk (she
is too elaborate and interesting)
Alt Country (she is too smart and too
literate)
Singer-Songwriter
(see Folk; also this isn’t a real genre)
Pop (see
Alt Country, also she uses way too many instruments)
Country
(see all of the above)
The enormity of the album arrives with a worthy statement
piece in leadoff track “Sun Song.” The
title sets off some of the Folk Alarms alluded to above, but this is no
squinting strumfest. There are a few
pleasantly acoustic seconds at the get-go, it is true, but what follows is a
veritable storm, actually, of
strings, pedal steel, and approximately 17 types of guitars (some of which
sound gloriously like they were reclaimed from heaps of postindustrial scrap
metal.)
Oh, and there are two gorgeous voices to guide the
spellbound listener through the din. The
first of these is steady-eddy Veirs herself, who seems to inhabit her songs as
much as she sings them: every bit an
instrument. The second, at precisely the
moment when Veirs goes falsetto for verse #3, is fellow Force of Nature Neko
Case. Somewhat hilariously, Case sounds
like she is standing an entire room away from her microphone. One suspects this is a mixing/recording
attempt to keep her rafter-razing tornado of a voice from clipping on the
finished product, but the effect is of a distant and powerful echo.
Veirs: “’Til that day I’ll bask in everything”
Case: “That you paint the arrows and the wheat”
After the initial dervish, there are breaths taken
throughout follow up tracks 2 “America” and 3 “Finster Saw the Angels.” The latter in particular is another Triumph
of the Interesting, in which an initially spare arrangement blossoms into an
eventual outro hoedown of guitar, accordion and pedal steel: something delightfully in-line with the
lyrical name-checking of Georgia, Tennessee, and Alabama. Subtle, and very, very nicely done.
One learns quickly, indeed, not to yank the ejector cord
early on the songs of Warp and Weft. Track 5 “Shape Shifter” and track 7 “Say
Darlin’ Say” are other examples of unassuming movements which later develop startling
complexity and rhythm. The latter
succeeds in superimposing an industrial-era railroad life over some good old
quixotic knight-errantry:
I played
cards in France, I played cards in Spain
And I’ll bet
you ten dollars
That I’ll
beat you at your game
I’ll cross
the bridge and the town will be mine
“Say Darlin’ Say” ends with the lonely sound of a bleating
train horn, which in turn is a fitting premonition for follow-up track “That
Alice.” Fitting because we have arrived
at the heaviest, rustiest track on Warp
and Weft. Guitars churn and clang,
and the ghosts of a hundred ratty-yet-beautiful alt-country songs sigh with
noisy content. All of this is both
greatly appreciated and a tad discordant—for a track written in memoriam for a
jazz harpist.
The album is not done cross-weaving wonderful songs against
surprising choices of subject matter.
“Ten Bridges” is probably the most urban-focused thing on Warp and Weft—it’s title references
Portland, OR’s stunning architectural landscape—and yet it is also, by a
generous margin, the prettiest and most delicate four minutes on the
album. The listener has ended up in a Carroll-esque
wonderland in which jazz harpists are celebrated with throngs of rough guitars,
and rusty old bridges are serenaded with delicate acoustic semi-ballads.
This works only because the skill behind the musical
arrangements is stunning.
Which brings us to titanic album closer “White Cherry.” It is as deconstructed a song as can be found
on Warp and Weft, and its
five-and-a-half minutes are not in a rush to get anywhere in particular. But into the breach Veirs tosses a piano, a
sitar and a farfisa (among lots of other stuff,) and the swirling combined
effect is a quite wonderful closing spell.
Adding to the triumph here is her welcome softening of lyrical
focus: the perspective is slightly more
wide-angle and slightly less resolved, which all works for the better:
Even in the
lean times
I take
pleasure in the wind chimes
And in
moments of excess
I try not
to overdo it
Such is the struggle, such as it is, for much of the album’s
writing. If Veirs tends toward one error
on Warp and Weft, it is the
persistently jarring specificity of some of the lyrics. “America” discusses “packing heat” and
“Founding fathers” rolling over “in their graves” (presumably, in the case of
Alexander Hamilton, due to the uneasy sleep of one who never got his take on
firearms quite right before the end.) A
few songs later, the potentially gorgeous “Sadako Folding Cranes” slips a gear
over lines like “the atom bomb explodes / she is blown through the window.”
Veirs is a leading-edge artist whose talent is quite clearly
multiple strata above that of Protest Singer.
She would do well lyrically to allow the listener more room to get lost
in her songs, and in doing so to locate their own revelations—to paint as a
Monet rather than a Seurat. The first
and last songs of Warp and Weft
accomplish this to outstanding effect.
An entire album of similar ilk might actually demand the creation of its
own new genre.
Keepers 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12
September 2013
