Laura Veirs' music is focused on her voice, lyrics, and guitar, but to call her simply a singer/songwriter misses the mark. It captures the pick-up-and-play directness of her songwriting while leaving out a whole other dimension: the formal distance and art-music aesthetics she brings to her albums. It's not that Veirs' songs-- where vestiges of jazz and blues enrich a sparse, rocky soil of folk and country-- couldn't be beat out on an acoustic guitar at a coffeehouse. But they would lose something crucial without their arrangements; a malleable sense of time and place. And not many coffeehouse singer/songwriters have recorded for Nonesuch or worked with jazz greats such as Bill Frisell and Brian Blade. Blade, Wayne Shorter's genius drummer, is but one of the illustrious guests on Warp and Weft, Veirs’ new album of sinewy, elemental songs, overcast with the anxieties of motherhood.
"Overcast" is nearly a constant in Veirs' music, which is easy to connect to her vantage from the Pacific Northwest. But more than Portland skies, Warp and Weft conjures a low, angular desert with percussion like rattlesnakes, guitars like scorpion stings, and pedal steels and string bends like reeling stars, all reverberating into shrouded gray distances. Veirs' voice runs through as clear and even as moonlight. With husband and long-time producer Tucker Martine, she fleshes out her wind-scoured terrain with pearly swirls of keyboard, a bit of mandolin and viola, some ruminative piano and organ. An electric guitar glints like mica chips from the woozily pitched terrain of "Sun Song", where Veirs alternates her breathiest and flintiest vocal timbres with shivery results. American music history is a ghostly presence: Jazz pianist and harpist Alice Coltrane is feted, strangely enough, with zooming guitar rock, and you know they had a harp around because it appears on "White Cherry", an unabashedly jazz number with a lush sax and big soft cymbals and chromatic organ vamps.
Warp and Weft was recorded while Veirs was eight months pregnant, and inklings of ambient violence, unthinkable abandonment, and maternal isolation toughen up her mannered idylls of the natural world. On "Dorothy of the Island", she belts out a snippet of a "Motherless Children", a folk song that's been recorded by everyone from Roseanne Cash to Eric Clapton. "Dorothy of the island fell into a well inside her head," Veirs adds in her own words, developing a stirring vocal melody over a softly ringing bed of electric guitar and keyboard. On the churning "America", she stares down an ominous country where "everyone's packing heat." And "Sadako Folding Cranes" enshrines a child who survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in a music-box shanty topped off with forlorn whistling, dispensing with several affectations at once.
At worst, Veirs can be a mite precious: You couldn't think up a better Decemberists parody title than "Finster Saw the Angels", which is about the folk artist who painted the cover of R.E.M.'s Reckoning. But the delicately chained unison of the guitar and vocal melodies makes for a standout passage in a record that feels fresher and sharper than we've heard from Veirs in awhile, and perhaps serves as the dark flipside of children's record Tumble Bee.
