This is a creative and varied set of songs that spiral high and swoop low, sometimes both at once – and there isn’t a weak link amongst them.
As she challenges our preconceptions of the genre, she also crafts a sublime LP, full of the ups and downs of life and parenthood, accompanied by beautiful melodies.
Warp and Weft is no hippie-dippy New Age paean to the goddess within, but more of a hard-edged look at life that doesn’t ignore nonphysical reality.
This is possibly her most satisfying album to date; it is, at times, quite spellbinding.
Displaying more of her raucous side, Warp and Weft is filled with tracks that easily find themselves among the best of her impressive catalog and manage to exceed expectations.
Warp and Weft conjures a low, angular desert with percussion like rattlesnakes, guitars like scorpion stings, and pedal steels and string bends like reeling stars, all reverberating into shrouded gray distances. Veirs' voice runs through as clear and even as moonlight.
It all amounts to a rich, evocative expression of a mother’s optimism and anxieties.
Laura Veirs returns to her electric guitar on Warp & Weft and delivers a dozen new songs that wind through skillfully textured, slightly psychedelicized rock, pop, and Americana, covering everything from the fears and joys of motherhood ... to disillusionment to homages to heroes to gratitude and spiritual awareness.
The instrumentation, songwriting and melody-making effortlessly comes together thanks to the clever layering and lovingly crafted placement of each and every sound.
A lot of the time 'Warp & Weft' is just very slow, and whilst there are a couple of earworms to be turned up here and there, it's mostly pretty stodgy
#56 | / | musicOMH |
#79 | / | Rough Trade |