Laura Veirs

Album: Laura Veirs: Carbon Glacier, Bella Union

By Andy Gill

13 February 2004

With Carbon Glacier, Laura Veirs has created an album with a strong, singular sense of place: the place being the Pacific Northwest of America, from the Colorado Rockies where she grew up, west to Seattle where she lives, and further on out, into the amniotic embrace of the Pacific. The ocean, Veirs concedes, "is everywhere in this recording", something she attributes to her obsession with Moby-Dick.

The region's bitter climate is reflected in the elemental imagery of songs like "Icebound Stream", "Snow Camping", "The Cloud Room" and "Wind is Blowing Stars", as Veirs subtly espouses a Zen-like pantheism that affords all things - the weather, water, ice, even rusting hulks of ships - a spiritual dimension usually reserved for living beings. Fittingly, the first track, "Ether Sings", opens by invoking music from the "wooden vibrating mouth" of her guitar, as if raising its spirit to speak. When it does, the gentle picking is warmed by an occasional gust of accordion and, at the end, a hypnotic blend of strings, synth whine and Veirs's amiable keening.

Few songwriters are blessed with the kind of contemplative, philosophical nature Veirs displays on Carbon Glacier, with childhood memories, sudden impulses and passing observations mined for deeper meaning. There's a keen, probing sensitivity throughout to aesthetic matters, with "Lonely Angel Dust" a meditation on the transient nature of beauty ("The rose is not afraid to blossom/ Though it knows its petals must fall"), and "Rapture" contemplating art as doomed attempts to capture the rapture of nature, with references to Monet, Basho, Kurt Cobain and Virginia Woolf illustrating the risks involved. "Love of colour, sound and words," muses Veirs, "Is it a blessing or a curse?"

The settings devised by Veirs and the producer Tucker Martine make striking use of the viola of Eyvind Kang (whose own fourth-world offering Virginal Coordinates was one of last year's hidden gems), either as mesmeric drones alongside Lori Goldstein's cello, or smearing piquant, Eastern-inflected streaks that bring new light and shade to a melody. Other instruments evoke their own elemental impressions: the drip-drip-drip of plaintive banjo, the foggy drone of organ, the light but vivid guitar-picking like leaves dancing in the breeze.

In places, the depth and atmosphere of the arrangements recalls Dylan's Time out of Mind, particularly the combination of ghostly, distant organ and bright, sparse guitar in "Shadow Blues". There are echoes of the The Dirty Three's contemporary sea-shanties, an allusion finally borne out in "Riptide", virtually a hymn to the ocean, an enthusiastic surrender to its ebb and flow: "I'll float here with the shrimp and brine/ And on my cheeks and hair/ The salt will always shine/ And with this phosphorescent map/ A sailor's chart, a mermaid's hand/ Something I'll find."

© 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd