Kathleen Edwards' fourth album, Voyageur, was co-produced with Justin Vernon, the man behind Bon Iver and creator of Pitchfork's 2011 album of the year. His involvement, along with the fact that they are dating, will inform the way many people approach the record, especially since it finds Edwards striking in some new musical directions. After building three albums on a sturdy country-rock Canadiana frame, she jettisons the bar-band guitars and twangy vocals in favor of a bigger sound marked by gauzy production and a fuller band that includes Vernon along with members of Megafaun, Francis & the Lights, and Peter Wolf Crier.
It still sounds like an Edwards album, but it's not hard to hear Vernon's influence. It's there in his yawping vocals on "Chameleon/Comedian" and in the bicycle bell on "Going to Hell", a sound that's quickly becoming his signature. And he may well be present in the lyrics, which chronicle not the end of one relationship and the start of another. The latter is most evident on the album's most upbeat song, "Sidecar", which evokes the dizzy excitement of new love, chronicling nothing more momentous than a whole day spent together. So Voyageur is both a break-up and a hook-up record; it's less about relationships than the spaces in between, where regret over the past and worry over the future can overlap and overwhelm.
Accordingly, there's more drama and dynamism in these songs than in her past work, as Edwards reshapes her sound to accommodate those themes. Instead of the guitar solos and full-band jams that sounded like genre accessories, she gives over more space to more complex instrumental passages that build or fade theatrically. Some listeners may ascribe such moments on "Mint" and "Change the Sheets" to her new collaborators, but Edwards was examining these ideas on 2008's Asking for Flowers, an album that rethought the inner workings of her songs while still grounding them in hardscrabble country music.
That record wasn't as ambitious as Voyageur, but it was rawer, rougher, and better. In fact, Edwards often sounds lost in these new songs. She has a great voice-- dusty and rambunctious-- and she still knows how to bend or break a note to add almost unbearable gravity to a particular line or phrase, but the new material asks her to strain her vocals uncomfortably, especially when she's singing wordlessly during those instrumental passages. Generally, she's keener on sensical lyrics than on voice-as-sound; she's an interpreter, so the meanings of words often inform her delivery. On "Mint" and "Going to Hell", her voice loses much of its personality without lyrics to guide her.
Thematically, these new musical avenues fit the lyrics nicely: Each song emphasizes change and risk, and Edwards never resorts to tired sentiments or platitudes about healing and hope. On the other hand, she does entertain a particularly tortured, hell-in-a-handbasket metaphor on "Going to Hell" and writes a few clunkers on "Change the Sheets" ("Change the sheets and then change me"). That is as new and startling as any sound on the album, as in the past Edwards has proved to be a very careful songwriter who made every line count. But Voyageur is her most traditionally confessional album, and while that might allow other singer-songwriters a bit more gravity and urgency, here the more intimate focus limits her lyrical range and stunts the album's impact.
Ultimately, it's a question of perspective. Edwards has written convincingly and often devastatingly about other people, attempting to view the world from the point of view of an abducted girl, a haggard housewife, or a woman carrying the baby of a criminal. That empathic endeavor lent her songs real bite, allowing her to sum up an entire life in a few well-chosen words. But on Voyageur, Edwards seems to get outside herself, never tries to get another angle on any particular issue, which saps the songs of their humor as well as their imaginative power.
