Much as I like the charmful Laura, I didn't race out to buy her latest, Year of Meteors, as soon as it hit the stores, several weeks ago now. There were two main reasons for this: the previous one, Carbon Glacier, while rightly (if somewhat surprisingly) embraced by the masses, had quite literally left me just a little bit cold by comparison to Troubled By The Fire (so I liked it rather a lot, and if anything considered it to be a step forward from TBTF, but didn't find myself really feeling the record); and I'd listened to and liked but again not really loved the samples which were up on Veirs' website (although that's such an unideal way to listen to music that I didn't place much stock in it...).
Anyhow, the other night I made a flying visit to uni to photocopy/borrow some Heidegger stuff, and stopped off at Readings in the expectation that a brief browse would be likely to improve my (not particularly poor to start with) state of mind (plus, I'd been struck by this weird dizziness, possibly born of lack of sleep + general being in a slightly weird headspace, and thought it might not be the world's worst idea to try to shake it off before driving home); ended up leaving with Gillian Welch's Time (The Revelator) (well, it was cheap), The Nightmare Before Christmas, Fear and Trembling (Kierkegaard not Nothomb, although I did read somewhere recently that there's a new Nothomb in translation which will be out soon - good news), and this cd.
I suppose that hoping that Veirs will record another "Ohio Clouds" or "Midnight Singer" is a bit like hoping that Radiohead will do another "Fake Plastic Trees" or "Street Spirit", although, like that latter hope, it's not entirely implausible if one is willing to accept that the resultant 'doing of another' would come wrapped in a fairly different sonic cloak. And, on its own terms, Year of Meteors is pretty fine. It continues in the direction indicated by Carbon Glacier, but it's a bit less distanced and cool, if equally echoey and vibey. Electric guitar is much more prominent (my fave moment on CG is still "Salvage A Smile", short as it is) and it's overall a bit more upbeat and drifty - 'oceanic', as is often the case with music I like, isn't too far off the mark (so okay, not that upbeat). It's actually a really neat sound overall, the folk strands are still very much there, and the electronic bits integrate well, and I'm not sure that anyone else is really doing a similar thing right now (Beth Orton, sorta...and there's a faint-but-definitely-there edge of New Adventures in Hi-Fi to its vibes, too).
Opener "Fire Snakes" is pretty cool, and likewise second track "Galaxies" (surely the first single, if any get released). "Magnetized" is the sort of gorgeous slow-burner which floats along and then suddenly gives you the chills, and somewhat recalls her older stuff, but it's probably the boppy "Rialto", complete with handclaps and that tasty wavery ragged crunchy guitar sound, which is my favourite; also particularly like "Parisian Dream", which slinks in on a slippy viola line and shuffles back and forth over the top of it for the rest of the song.
A few other scattered thoughts:
- After couple of listens, I realised that the familiar-sounding descending scale which features prominently in "Where Gravity Is Dead" has also been used in the Muses' "Honeychain", and hence the familiarity.
- Speaking of "Where Gravity Is Dead", I wonder if there's a vague kind of concept to the album, a thought prompted by a corresponding lyric from "Galaxies": "gravity is dead you see/no gravity!/ all I need is beating red/no gravity! ...".
- Also, one corollary of getting into all these singer-songwriters is that an increasing number of the records I own have pictures of the artist's face on their covers; I can live with this as a seemingly necessary evil, but I'm really not at all down with it. (Q: Would it make a difference if they were all extremely good-looking? A: No, that's completely not the point.)
