I'm trying to imagine Laura Veirs playing in a Pacific Northwest-style girl punk group. Apparently, that's what her first band was, back when she was studying geology and Mandarin Chinese at college in Minnesota. Her voice is so suited to the neo-folk path she's chosen to follow in her subsequent career that it's sort of tough to conjure an angry yelp from her. Not that she's all sweetness and light-- her albums have always housed their fair share of darkness and turmoil. They've just favored subtle ways to present those things. On her seventh album, July Flame, Veirs takes all the best things about her previous output, including her two justly lauded efforts for Nonesuch, and distills them into her best record.
Veirs has never brought so many great songs to a single album, and longtime producer Tucker Martine captures a warmth in Veirs' voice and acoustic guitar that immediately welcomes you in, from the first floating, Leonard Cohen-ish guitar part that levitates the simple album opener "I Can See Your Tracks". Strangely for a record released in the grip of winter, July Flame has the atmosphere of a sweet summer night, with fireflies and an insect chorus-- it's not the direct heat of a summer day, but a fading, residual heat. It's also a patient record built around vocal melody and flashes of lyrical imagery.
The summer feel is probably not accidental-- a July flame is a type of peach-- and it proves good inspiration for a lot of surprising and truly lovely moments. The title track orbits a simple but sturdy electric guitar phrase and mallet drumming, mixing real viola with a string synthesizer for a really interesting texture leading up to the choral final chorus. The instrumentation sometimes looks odd on paper-- a pump organ here, a bass clarinet there, tenor sax in a folk setting, but every unorthodox choice is well-made. Eyvind Kang's viola is played in a style halfway between bluegrass fiddling and classical formalism on "Where Are You Driving?", mingling with the pump organ and banjo to create a weird little world. Stephen Barber's string arrangement on the troubled but optimistic closer "Make Something Good" is less window dressing than a yearning answer to her assertion, "It's gonna take a long, long time/ But we're gonna make something so fine."
There are a couple of spectacular song's at the record's heart-- "Summer Is the Champion" is a swinging rave-up that bursts with horns after its second jazz-inflected chorus, while "Wide-Eyed, Legless" is a mysterious, almost Floydian psych-folk song with an utterly infectious verse melody. But Veirs is just as effective in the understated moments. "When You Give Your Heart" wrings gobs of loveliness from just a few guitars and a canny rhythmic shift to the chorus, and then there's "Carole Kaye", a sweet and clearly heartfelt tribute to the great session bassist with lyrics fashioned from the titles of the some of the many huge hits Kaye played on. The refrain "It would be so cool to be like Carol, Carol Kaye" is disarming in its refreshing modesty.
Veirs probably doesn't need to be so modest-- her band of Kang, Martine, Steve Moore, Jon Neufield, and longtime collaborator Karl Blau is bolstered by a couple of big guests in My Morning Jacket's Jim James and the Decemberists' guitarist Chris Funk. But a little bit of starry-eyed hero worship amidst all the poetic imagery keeps the album grounded in spite of all its poetic flights, and July Flame is ultimately a record that's easy to get into and just as easy to stay with.
