Laura Veirs: Year of Meteors

CML call number: CD POPULAR Veirs
Jon Pareles wrote in the New York Times: "The elemental powers of nature course through Laura Veirs's songs on 'Year of Meteors' … Ms. Veirs … once studied to be a geologist. Now, like a latter-day Romantic poet, she maps her feelings across the landscape and the cosmos. There are ocean waves, lava flows and mudslides, and that's just in the album's first song; in the second, 'galaxies fall down my cheeks/ galaxies they flood the street.' Lyrics like that usually come with new-age pretension or prog-rock bombast, but there's none of that on the album. For Ms. Veirs, marvels and cataclysms are intimate, something to sing about with an acoustic guitar and a breathy familiarity that's almost matter-of-fact, even when she's imagining that 'furnaces burn everlasting black tattoos of you on me.' In this collection of enigmatic songs, romance and travel, psychology and geography are inseparable; each journey reflects inward. Her band, the Tortured Souls, can play breezy folk-pop (complete with viola) or distorted electric rock, and it often slips eerie electronic sounds into the mix" ("Critic's Choice: New CD's," 8/22/05).