Friday, February 19, 2010
Cream Calendar / Creamtastic Laura Veirs at The Basement Sunday
Posted by Steve Haruch on Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 4:28 PM
Hey, I wrote this Critic's Pick for the Laura Veirs show at The Basement Sunday night. It goes like this:
On her latest, July Flame, Laura Veirs -- obligatory mention as Decemberists collaborator: check -- shows her continued facility with setting a folk songwriter's sense of melody against compositions awash with odd guitar figures, offbeat arrangements and all manner of instruments, from pedal steel to horns and distorted synths. For all their unconventional structures, though, Veirs' songs still maintain a central gravity that's abetted rather than hindered by her unusual, sometimes oblique lyrics. Snakes appear in people's collars, fields of stone turn to magma, and all the time Veirs sings in a calm, evocative voice that lends her brand of magic realism its understated urgency. And how can you not love someone who writes a song about legendary session bassist Carol Kaye? You can't, that's how.
Carol Kaye! You know she played bass on Pet Sounds, right? And allegedly has 10,000 recordings to her name? In a case of coincidence, Jessica Hopper (music consultant at This American Life, author of The Girls' Guide to Rocking) just wrote an excellent piece on Kaye for L.A. Weekly, and also just interviewed Veirs, and talked about touring while pregnant. Anyway, this isn't really a post about Carol Kaye. Go to The Basement Sunday night and see Laura Veirs. She's one of the good ones.
Here's a video from "Cast a Hook in Me," from her last album, Saltbreakers.
Comments (5)
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Laura Veirs is awesome.
Check out "Year of Meteors"
it's wonderful start to finish.
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