BELLACD412
Release Date: 20 August 2013
Laura Veirs' music is focused on her voice, lyrics, and guitar, but to call her simply a singer/songwriter misses the mark. It captures the pick-up-and-play directness of her songwriting while leaving out a whole other dimension: the formal distance and art-music aesthetics she brings to her albums. It's not that Veirs' songs-- where vestiges of jazz and blues enrich a sparse, rocky soil of folk and country-- couldn't be beat out on an acoustic guitar at a coffeehouse. But they would lose something crucial without their arrangements; a malleable sense of time and place. And not many coffeehouse singer/songwriters have recorded for Nonesuch or worked with jazz greats such as Bill Frisell and Brian Blade. Blade, Wayne Shorter's genius drummer, is but one of the illustrious guests on Warp and Weft, Veirs’ new album of sinewy, elemental songs, overcast with the anxieties of motherhood.
- Brian Howe, Pitchfork (2013)