CD Review

Looking deep into her big beautiful eyes on the cover of her fifth album Year of Meteors, you begin to wonder if you’ve seen Laura Veirs somewhere before. Her blond hair whizzing all around her face, she begins to resemble that bohemian grad student you dated in college or that stylishly sexy girl who made your latte this morning at Starbucks. She’s a woman with an expressionless Prozac smile who exudes a smart cool that you infuriatingly can’t quite put your finger on but you want to make an attempt anyways. While this wordy description may not represent Laura Veirs the person, but it helps describe the album she has made.

A mysterious and simple guitar opens Year of Meteors followed by Veirs’ lanky impassive anti-depressant vocals gliding across the first track “Fire Snakes.” You instantaneously recall early Suzanne Vega, but when “Galaxies” begins, you realize you may have underestimated her ability as the haunting space-age synthesizers take the music deeper than you thought it could go. With lyrics that uses her geology background as a metaphor for love (“Slain by your zirconium smile,” the opening line in “Magnetized,” is an example of how her words can behave clever and acidic), it becomes clear Veirs is not an open book. She forces the listener infuriatingly to take the extra time to research and see how she ticks, because in reality this is how most relationships work.

At first listen, you sense her detachment from her own music. After a few spins, you begin to realize she approaches her songs as a geologist approaches her studies - methodically. Exasperating for the unassuming, Year of Meteors is twelve tracks of hypothesis and theories for those who are willing to reach the gratifying conclusion that you can judge a record by its cover: beautiful, lingering, and peculiar.