BELLACD52
Release Date: 12 October 2004
"This is an oddly beautiful album - far more engaging than you'd expect of one written in a grey Seattle winter, pondering mortality, Moby Dick and the great sheet of blackened ice after which it's named. Melodic, slightly skewed folk, it sounds like Sinéad O'Connor channelling Nick Drake on top of a bare mountain, or Cat Power trapped in a little girl's musical jewellery box. Backed by the roots-rock instruments of her band, the Tortured Souls, plus a large handful of guests adding brass and strings, the songs shift imperceptibly from serene spookiness to Incredible String Band-esque cosmic pastoral; from coffee-house folk to haunting lullabies. The finest, Rapture, deliberates on the death of beauty while namechecking Monet, Virginia Woolf and Kurt Cobain." - Sylvie Simmons, The Guardian (2004)
"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." - Pitchfork
"Laura Veirs' Seattle is not a city plagued by rain and enormous bowls of coffee; rather, it's a metropolitan snow globe trapped in a solid sheet of ice. The 13 songs that make up her fourth album (and Nonesuch debut), Carbon Glacier, rely on Veirs' free associating motor-mouth imagery to dig them out the tundra, and it's a testament to her skills as an interpreter that the majority of them break through." - Allmusic