Meg Baird's career has seldom lacked for action or variety; she co-founded the highly esteemed Philly psych-folk group Espers, has performed with her sister Laura as the Baird Sisters, played drums with noisy punk combo Watery Love, and sung alongside the likes of Kurt Vile, Will Oldham, and Sharon Van Etten. If she so chose, she surely has the skills and connections to make an expansive, cross-genre album studded with guest appearances, but she hasn't seemed interested in that. She has always kept her solo albums streamlined and direct, focusing her songs almost exclusively on her finger-picked guitar and radiant voice. Likewise, her thematic approach has never been panoramic; instead her albums tend to feel like private journals, wherein a particular mood is set and then sustained and refined.
The same holds true, with a few subtle but important variations, for Baird's third solo album, Don't Weigh Down the Light. Her past albums have featured several interpretations of traditional folk standards and well-wrought covers of such obscurities as House of Love's "Beatles and the Stones". In fact her style is so steeped in British and Appalachian folk forms that at times even her original songs have sounded as if they had been written in a previous century. On Don't Weigh Down the Light, however, all of the tracks are Baird originals, and are less reliant on traditional folk idioms.
Where her previous album, 2011's Seasons on Earth, was ornamented with pedal steel and other subtle country touches, Baird is here joined throughout by Charlie Saufley, formerly of SF acid rock heavyweights the Assemble Head in Sunburst Sound. On several tracks here the duo of Baird and Saufley masquerade as a full band, with each playing multiple instruments and filling the songs' ample open spaces with gentle ripples of organ, 12-string guitar, and percussion. As a result Don't Weigh Down the Light is the closest Baird has come in her solo work to reclaiming the cosmic turf once occupied by Espers.
In the time since the release of Seasons on Earth, Baird moved from her longtime base of Philadelphia to San Francisco, and it doesn't feel too outlandish to suggest that Baird's move has had a substantial influence on Don't Weigh Down the Light. There is a general feel of transition and displacement permeating such tracks as "Past Houses" or "Even the Walls Don't Want You to Go". Midway through the album is a short track simply entitled "Leaving Song", featuring nothing but Baird's multi-tracked vocals, wordlessly cascading down in a manner that can sound alternately melancholic or prayer-like, depending on the listener's current frame of mind.
Brief though the track is, its placement seems noteworthy, almost as though it is the hinge upon which the rest of the album is meant to pivot. Curiously, the vocal melody of "Leaving Song" returns a few songs later as a background track on "Even the Walls Don't Want You to Go". This echoing, especially when coupled with the following reprise of the song "Past Houses", gives the album a circular feel, as though Baird's songs are doubling back upon themselves in a continuous loop of departures and arrivals.
Baird's voice sounds as potent and icy-clear as ever. As evidenced by her work with Espers and the Baird Sisters, her voice is well-suited to close-harmony singing, and here she makes frequent use of vocal multi-tracking, adding whispery harmonies at what sounds like the upper limits of her register. In combination with the casual jammy vibe on some of the instrumental passages, these airy harmonies recall some of the folkier aspects of Popol Vuh. In recent months Baird and Saufley have joined forces with Comets on Fire's Ethan Miller to form the West Coast psych outfit Heron Oblivion, and if their work together on Don't Weigh Down the Light is any indication, that might herald even further fruitful departures.
