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Laura Veirs "July Flame" album review
New York Times * January 11, 2010
by Ben Ratliff

Critics' Choice
New CDs

LAURA VEIRS
"July Flame"
(Raven Marching Band)

"Honey wax/melt it down/make your heart molten somehow," sings the Portland, Ore., singer-songwriter Laura Veirs in "Summer Is the Champion," drawing out her vowels cleanly. The song begins with a finger-strummed nylon-string guitar, takes on horn-section harmony over wakeful rhythm and piano chords on every beat, and finally graduates to sumptuous pools of pedal-steel guitar, Neil Young in 1971 style.

It's full of texture, this song. You almost want to run your hands across it and feel the nicks in the wood grain, or order it off the appetizer menu in your town's new warehouse-district restaurant run by a ruddy-faced genius with a beard. And so with the rest of Ms. Veirs's new record, "July Flame," named after a farmer's market peach. It's full of layered folk and indie-rock bucolia and plain-spoken but stretchy-thinking language, wherein everyday energies or objects transubstantiate into other, metaphorically richer ones. (In another song, "When You Give Your Heart," love is proffered as "wires, feathers and clouds"; in other tracks you'll find "hornet rain," "blood inside the maple tree" and "ashes of a secret heart/falling in my lemonade.")

On this album the sonic experimentation is a little more modest than on her previous two, "Saltbreakers" and "Year of Meteors," which were released on Nonesuch. ("July Flame" is on her own label, Raven Marching Band Records. On ravenmarchingband.com you can order a 36-page limited-edition songbook for the album, complete with guitar tablatures, designed by the Portland artist and designer Carson Ellis.) At root it's more of a one-person, solitary project, even as autoharp, pump organs and string arrangements by guest players drift in and out.

Ms. Veirs lives with Tucker Martine, the producer of her records, who can give an artisanal fussiness to any kind of music. But there are some great, seemingly unforced, seancelike moments here involving Jim James of My Morning Jacket, singing harmony vocals, as well the violist Eyvind Kang and the keyboardist Steve Moore. She still makes cagey, careful music, but it's easing up, getting warmer.