Album review: Laura Veirs – Warp & Weft

Veirs’ stock rises once more with a strong collection of deftly arranged, eloquent songs.

Veirs recorded this ninth studio album while pregnant with her second child, and it’s redolent of a mother’s optimism and anxieties for her children.

From gun violence and suicide to mid-winter suns and blossoming trees, light and dark is threaded through the alt-folk, as are contributions from Jim James, KD Lang and Neko Case.

Together with her partner/producer Tucker Martine, Veirs creates lush ensemble arrangements of varied pace and texture.

Sun Song is an uplifting start with lap steel guitar and vocal harmony, moving on to the glowing electric guitar warming Finister Saw The Angels and the trundling traintrack Americana of Say Darlin’ Say.

The Alice Coltrane folk fable That Alice is even bolstered by Neil Young-style rockin’ guitar, while Ikaria, a 90-second interlude, reinforces Veirs’ grip on dynamics and textures, with woodblock crisply snapping next to jangly guitar and pretty piano motif.

White Cherry closes the album, a beautiful potion of woozy trumpet, insistent piano and brushed cymbal, wrapped in a night sky eiderdown of twinkling harp strings.

This is a wide-ranging, precisely executed and deep, involving alt-folk record, up there with Veirs’ best.

Rating: 4/5