Carbon Glacier

Artist: Laura Veirs
Label: Bella Union
Category: Music

Average customer rating:

Format: Import
Media: Audio CD
Number Of Discs: 1

EAN: 5050693087821
ASIN: B0001BH16O

Release Date: 2004-03-16

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Listmania:

The Best of '04
Godesses: The Next Generation
Young, Brave & Intimate
Best of 2004 (part 1)

Tracks:

Ether Sings
Icebound Stream
Rapture
Lonely Angel Dust
Cloud Room
Wind Is Blowing Stars
Shadow Blues
Anne Bonny Rag
Snow Camping
Chimney Sweeping Man
Salvage a Smile
Blackened Anchor
Riptide

Customer Reviews:

Haunting and sublime.......2004-08-09

Having tracked this down on the basis of the rave review in "Uncut" proved to be worthwhile indeed. It's a stark and strange album, but (in my opinion) even more beautiful and truthful for that. Visually and verbally, Veirs mixes imagery of arctic cold, dark, even death with light, grace, and life, almost unwaveringly connecting concrete experience of the here- and-now with suggestings of significance which rarely weigh heavily. (There are a few clunker lines, like "the rose is not afraid to blossom..." -- afraid? -- but they are very few, and the overall level of lyricism is so astonishingly evocative and apt that the lapses both grate and confirm the beauty of the rest.) Arrangements, instrumentation, production, and engineering are deceptively simple and gorgeous in a spare way, in which the parts all integrate into a full whole. The sound and effect of this album is unique, and it's hard to imagine it being done differently. Veirs and producer Tucker Martine have great ears. Veirs' voice is both beautiful and haunting, even strange. Obviously, I can't speak for her intentions, but as a listener I hear an occasional quavering and freedom with pitch that I suspect may grate for some but which, to me, make for a wonderful fit with the sound and sense of the words and phrases, and the instrumental context of the songs. The overall effect is transcendent; to this listener, at least, there is a feeling that you really "get it" -- that the visual images, the intellectual content, the emotional impact, and the aural experience are all fully conveyed. The results range from almost scarily wonder-full to earthy; the scale of the songs ranges from cosmic to concrete. And, finally, I've got to say that in my view at least, Veirs comes across as modest, empathetic, generous, affirming, and humane -- never preachy or self-consciously "artistic." She just gives you this stuff (at the price of the album, of course). As with all music that's good and true, this album is likely to be well-received by many for good reason, and perhaps experienced as odd and tangential by others... for good reason. I give it 5 stars on my own scale and for its quality and intentions, but that's not to say that everyone will love it.

Voice of my dreams.......2004-06-04

I can't stop listening to this woman. I have my work albums and my home albums, and they're the real thing. I'm determined that Laura affords to keep writing and singing , so no ripping in my house. Ms Veirs gets every cent that's coming to her.

Damn, where have I heard that voice before? Kate Rusby? ISB's Licorice? Kim Carnes, of 'Bette Davis eyes' fame? Iris DeMent? Nope - I've gone thru my entire collection, played her down the phone to pals, researched Amazon for any memory jogger, and zilch. I can only conclude that the divine Vox Veirs-ienne has been echoing siren-like inside me down the years, and is finally now made flesh.

Yukk, what a cheesy remark. Exactly the sort of soppy reviewer rubbish that causes me to instantly click on and never go near the artiste in question again.

Ignore my over-purpled prose and just lend this amazing talent an ear - you'll be chuffed you did. Try "Troubled by Fire", track 7, "Tiger Tattoos". Swoon to that quavery voice; listen stunned to the wondrous Bill Frisell's accompaniment (he works more miracles on tracks 9 and 11.)

But don't fall for listening to #2 on the same album - "Bedroom Eyes". You'll play it again, and again, and then the whole album several times, and then you'll roam the streets for any store clued-up enough to stock the equally excellent single, "Cloud Room."

A major talent whose future direction we can't even guess at save to say that it's going to be rewarding to watch her grow. And we caught her in the early days!

The Stark Beauty Of A Young Poet.......2004-04-15

Certain things -"growth" for instance, or "breadth"- cannot be said about artists who are still so young, and only a few albums into their careers. Yet with Ms. Laura Veirs, the exquisite breadth that she is already showing -from Troubled By Fire to Carbon Glacier- and her growth as a performer, are remarkable, however young, however "untenured" she may be. There are, like the prior reviewer says, laments, yet not they are not only that. They are explorations, impressions, musical poems. Jewels as diverse as "Ether Sings," "Lonely Angel Dust," "Shadow Blues," Snow Camping" or "Chimney Sweeping Man" alone justify, and fully prove, Veirs' talent, sensibility, and the astonishing maturity of her compositions. Another important mention is the "dead-on" production by Tucker Martine who does what even some great producers forget to do, at times, he disappeared behind Laura Veirs' music, and yet has taken it to a new poetic and expressive plateau. I personally has heard enough to vow to follow Laura Veirs to whatever layers this album is still to take me, and whatever new depths may it have still unexplored.

pitchforkmedia review. 7.7 out of 10.0.......2004-03-12

You've spent the day wasting; traipsing through the back alleys and vacant side-streets of the city, peering through the windows of empty thrift stores and boarded-up bookshops. On the route home, you wander through the weekend rush-hour with a disc full of sad songs on your CD-R. You watch the grizzled faces of passers-by, groaning and wincing into their wallets; the sportswear-clad kids making fake male poses to each single girl they see; the dispossessed park-benchers, clutching cheap supermarket booze and silently screaming out, "F--- the world."

There's something comforting about surveying such sights with just a solitary voice reverberating through your headphones, siphoning out the sounds of a thousand strangers' voices and focusing upon one woman's restless muse. It's like hearing a voice that's been lost in the crowd, taken and amplified to drown out all that lies in its periphery until on its own, it sounds lonely, strange and fearlessly beautiful.

Laura Veirs' first album, Troubled by the Fire, was a beguiling infant of a record; a slow hug of furnace-warmth and lilting grace that reveled in romance and lovestruck simplicity, striding down a similar, country-flecked path to songwriters such as Gillian Welch and Lucinda Williams. However, on this follow-up, Veirs treads a vastly different path, producing an album of opaque, wintered laments that evoke the cold, jagged landscape of the Colorado Rockies that formed this Seattle-based songwriter's childhood.

The mood is evoked with arresting results. Playing with the same kind of geeky, grad-school persona as Liz Phair on Exile in Guyville, yet with a hauntedness similar to Chan Marshall or Kristin Hersh, songs such as the beat-less outsider blues of "Chimney Sweeping Man" stalk with controlled, simmering psychosis ("Maybe you thought I'd be president with my Cheshire grin.../ Well, I'm a lowland forest resident"). With its cross-stitched guitar-line, sprinklings of synthetic ambience and lyrics snatched from stream-of-consciousness journal entries, the opening "Ether Sings" is starkly beautiful. Much of this is due to the credible production work of sometime Modest Mouse/Howe Gelb collaborator Tucker Martine; whose bare and simplistic arrangements still bear enough edge and interest so as not to dull the listener into passivity. As Veirs' voice reaches its angel-sweet peak on the chorus to "Rapture", a strange, descending vibraphone emerges, conjuring an air of stargazed self-discovery.

Veirs' songwriting and Martine's intuitive production reach their combined peak on the wonderfully distant "Salvage a Smile"-- ironically the album's shortest track. Above a flurry of urgently-plucked, overdriven guitar and Veirs' despondent poetry, experimental stringsman Eyvind Kang creates a wonderful cacophony of human despair and strained dissonance.

Unfortunately, where the album surpasses its predecessor in terms of songcraft and musicality, it lacks the same hand-held warmth. This is not simply due to the dour, disaffected subject matter; on "Icebound Stream", Veirs sounds so detached and impenetrable that the listener is left without any empathy for the song or its orator. Furthermore, as anyone who's ever tried to write in a free-flowing, stream-of-consciousness style knows, 90% of what comes out is hideous self-indulgence. While much of Carbon Glacier avoids this charge due to strong editing, one can't help but think how Veirs can possibly sing "Rapture", with its line, "Doesn't the tree write great poetry?", and not want to tie her own face in knots.

These flaws come as the result of an ambition that has not yet been fully realized, but cannot detract from the fact that Carbon Glacier is a cold, beautiful and engaging record that translates the bleak, isolated vastness of nature into the bleak, isolated vastness of the modern city-sprawl, leaving one voice to sing in solitude. If only more records sounded this alone.

-Neil Robertson, March 12th, 2004

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