Laura Veirs, July Flame
Reviewed by: Caspar
Laura Veirs is thirty-six years old and looks like a librarian. A talented musician and songwriter, she is derided by her detractors as a steady, perfectly decent artist – as, you know, fine, whatever. I get really incredibly sick of this crap – as if everybody had to reinvent themselves on every album and knock down boundaries the whole flipping time. For me, music is mostly about creating a bridge between people – about telling stories, creating tunes, for people to find themselves in, and find communion in. It’s also about writing pretty songs, for crying out loud.
Which is where Laura Veirs’ new album, the beautiful July Flame, comes in. It’s by far her most lovely record, with a sort of rapturous feeling to it, and a real warmth radiating out of her voice and arrangements. On previous records (like the wonderful, haunting Carbon Glacier and its less focused follow-up, Year of Meteors), Veirs’ decidedly tinny voice might have been problematic for people – especially as her delivery verged on the strident, like Aimee Mann, in endless reverb, calling her sisterhood to war. But here she has softened her edges, and not in a weedy, wet, boring way – but rather by relaxing into her medium and finding her voice.
So here we have it: a steady album in a folky singer-songwriter vein, with moments of gorgeousness. Take the album’s title song, which is sweetly constructed around a few licks of bass, squeaky acoustic, and pedal-steel: these form a great background for Veirs’ reverby vocals, which have a real dreaminess to them as she sings, “Can I call you mine?” It’s a tender song, but inquisitive, full of odd lyrical touches, that charms you as it progresses. And then a bit of violin starts up, and a little choir also, and it ends up in a collage of all of this, quite wonderfully. It’s actually quietly ambitious, as far as music goes.
Then there are my two favourite songs of the record, which follow that one – the languorous ‘Sun Is King’, with a lazy pedal-steel guitar woozing like hell behind Veirs’ voice, harmonising to tingle effect with a male accompanist on the choruses. The harmonies and vocals are one of the happiest things here; I get the sense she’s listened to the Fleet Foxes a little bit. So that song is really attractive and fresh – but it only gets prettier on the next one, ‘Where Are You Driving?’, which has some delicate violin, softly plucked banjo and some wonderful, roiling, deep piano and then a chorus that just seems to surge from the deep, with a harmony that just bursts into life, seemingly out of nowhere. It seems like the sort of leap she might not have allowed herself previously – where she was clipped and precise before, like a high wire tightrope act, she’s now lying in the grass, blissed out and looking at the sky.
Yet this is still a very focused, good album – full of nuance, and interesting patterns of words; Veirs is one of those artists who can really surprise you with a lyric. And there’s ambition, as I said, in some of her arrangements; violins looping around, and some doo-wop vocals and brass complementing her songwriting. I like ‘Summer Is The Champion’ with its skippy beat and its trumpets; I love the driving rhythm of ‘Wide-Eyed, Legless’ and its odd cries in the background which give way to a beautiful chorus that ties itself up and bleeds back into the verses. It’s just really sweet and interesting. And ‘Carol Kaye’ – where you really hear that Fleet Foxes sound – is a glorious collage of bold backing vocals that swirl around and finger-plucked guitar that gives way to some really good brass.
Wow – this album actually just got better for me, right there, in the act of reviewing it. There are far more songs on it that I love than I might have thought; it has that great thing going for it, where another song that you love comes on and surprises you, as you’d forgotten that you still had it in store.
So overall, there we have it: a good, interesting, thoughtful, well-crafted album full of lovely, ephemeral moments of real beauty that thorougly transcend the occasional dourness. That’s good enough for me.
Rating: 87%
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