The Pacific Northwest coughs up folksy, understated singer-songwriters by the coffeehouseful, which puts Portland-based Laura Gibson at risk of getting lost in the crowd. That would be a shame: Gibson has more to offer than vague descriptors like "folksy" and "understated" would suggest, and besides, her music is far better suited to a fireplace and a cup of warm apple cider than to your local Starbucks. Raised in a tiny coastal town, the soft-spoken songstress inched quietly into the scene in 2006 with If You Come to Greet Me, her refreshingly homespun if sometimes staid full-length debut. At first blush, the follow-up, Beasts of Seasons, doesn't appear to mark a significant departure from its predecessor. But unravel its seemingly rudimentary façade and you'll find an affecting study in contrasts from a songwriter a good deal more sophisticated than she's generally willing to let on.
At the core of this study is a thematic concept of Gibson's own design. She's divided the record roughly in half; "Communion Songs" comprise the first part, while the second is made up of "Funeral Songs". Yet the two ideas are hardly mutually exclusive, a notion Gibson makes evident in the opening song, seven and a half minutes of gently cascading majesty entitled "Shadows on Parade". Apart from evoking the passage of time, the song's central image-- "I will watch the shadows on parade"-- suggests the solitude, repose, and even isolation of the lonely and the waiting. With Gibson's "parade" description, however, the solitary activity of shadow-watching becomes something contrastingly communal and celebratory, a point underscored by the sample of a distant drum corps and crowd she and producer Tucker Martine (the Decemberists, Sufjan Stevens, Mudhoney) use to close out the song. It's the first of many little moments on the record that illustrate Gibson's willingness to see an image through at a time when a lot of similar songwriters are content to settle for what "feels good" or "sounds good" and move along.
Shadow-watching gives way to other pensive activities as Beasts continues: reminiscence, daydreams, diary-like appeals to an unnamed "other", and the meditations on mortality that mark the "Funeral" half of the record. "If these bare walls could sing," Gibson begins on the transitional track "Funeral Songs"-- is she still watching and waiting for something even after the sunset has extinguished that parade of shadows? Indeed, a line about a body "swaying like a drunkard" and a trio of ruminations on Gibson's mother, father, and sister on closing track "Glory" are among the few moments where we're transported from Gibson's head to someplace outside. Yet for all of the singer's insularity, she never sounds alone on Beasts of Seasons, thanks to a mostly exquisite array of backing arrangements courtesy of a host of PDX luminaries, including Laura Veirs, labelmate Shelly Short, and members of the Decemberists, M. Ward's band, Menomena, and Norfolk & Western. "Spirited", easily the record's liveliest track, gets a boost from a chorus of "OOH-ooh-OOH"s and booming percussion-work that keep things moving at a steady cantor, while "Where Have All Your Good Words Gone?"'s fatalistic imagery rubs up against foreboding timpani rolls and chilly fiddle-playing that calls to mind Death bowing the buried to life in Saint-Saëns' Danse Macabre.
As a singer, Gibson treats syllables with the same patience and loving precision a mosaic maker might put into cutting and arranging his/her tiles. It comes as little surprise, then, that words are a lyrical preoccupation of Gibson's throughout Beasts of Seasons. On "Come By Storm", the singer recalls how she "took great care with words," and, later, how she loses herself to them. "Spirited" finds her describing how "morning tends to... turn our words to smoke," while the aforementioned "Where Have All Your Good Words Gone?" has her grappling with the loss of a loved one by asking, "Where are all the pleasures from the timbre of your tongue?" Yet for all her talk of words, Gibson allows herself a fairly limited lexicon on Beasts of Seasons. If she knows some "good" ones like her sesquipedalian-prone onetime tourmate and fellow Portlander Colin Meloy, she wisely forgoes them in favor of repeated references to bodies and bones, trees and tongues, pictures, poems, and stories-- all of which lend the record a reflexivity that rewards repeat listens.
