Pitchfork

You've spent the day wasting; traipsing through the back alleys and vacant side-streets of the city, peering through the windows of empty thrift stores and boarded-up bookshops. On the route home, you wander through the weekend rush-hour with a disc full of sad songs on your CD-R. You watch the grizzled faces of passers-by, groaning and wincing into their wallets; the sportswear-clad kids making fake male poses to each single girl they see; the dispossessed park-benchers, clutching cheap supermarket booze and silently screaming out, "Fuck the world."

There's something comforting about surveying such sights with just a solitary voice reverberating through your headphones, siphoning out the sounds of a thousand strangers' voices and focusing upon one woman's restless muse. It's like hearing a voice that's been lost in the crowd, taken and amplified to drown out all that lies in its periphery until on its own, it sounds lonely, strange and fearlessly beautiful.

Laura Veirs' first album, Troubled by the Fire, was a beguiling infant of a record; a slow hug of furnace-warmth and lilting grace that reveled in romance and lovestruck simplicity, striding down a similar, country-flecked path to songwriters such as Gillian Welch and Lucinda Williams. However, on this follow-up, Veirs treads a vastly different path, producing an album of opaque, wintered laments that evoke the cold, jagged landscape of the Colorado Rockies that formed this Seattle-based songwriter's childhood.

The mood is evoked with arresting results. Playing with the same kind of geeky, grad-school persona as Liz Phair on Exile in Guyville, yet with a hauntedness similar to Chan Marshall or Kristin Hersh, songs such as the beat-less outsider blues of "Chimney Sweeping Man" stalk with controlled, simmering psychosis ("Maybe you thought I'd be president with my Cheshire grin.../ Well, I'm a lowland forest resident"). With its cross-stitched guitar-line, sprinklings of synthetic ambience and lyrics snatched from stream-of-consciousness journal entries, the opening "Ether Sings" is starkly beautiful. Much of this is due to the credible production work of sometime Modest Mouse/Howe Gelb collaborator Tucker Martine; whose bare and simplistic arrangements still bear enough edge and interest so as not to dull the listener into passivity. As Veirs' voice reaches its angel-sweet peak on the chorus to "Rapture", a strange, descending vibraphone emerges, conjuring an air of stargazed self-discovery.

Veirs' songwriting and Martine's intuitive production reach their combined peak on the wonderfully distant "Salvage a Smile"-- ironically the album's shortest track. Above a flurry of urgently-plucked, overdriven guitar and Veirs' despondent poetry, experimental stringsman Eyvind Kang creates a wonderful cacophony of human despair and strained dissonance.

Unfortunately, where the album surpasses its predecessor in terms of songcraft and musicality, it lacks the same hand-held warmth. This is not simply due to the dour, disaffected subject matter; on "Icebound Stream", Veirs sounds so detached and impenetrable that the listener is left without any empathy for the song or its orator. Furthermore, as anyone who's ever tried to write in a free-flowing, stream-of-consciousness style knows, 90% of what comes out is hideous self-indulgence. While much of Carbon Glacier avoids this charge due to strong editing, one can't help but think how Veirs can possibly sing "Rapture", with its line, "Doesn't the tree write great poetry?", and not want to tie her own face in knots.

These flaws come as the result of an ambition that has not yet been fully realized, but cannot detract from the fact that 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.