WOMAD

Laura Veirs

From United States

The sound of the Pacific North-West isn’t all about the crunching guitars of those longhaired grunge types. Sometimes you’ve also got to watch the quiet ones. Take Laura Veirs, for instance, the Seattle-based singer-songwriter who, over three short years, has garnered more critical acclaim than she can possibly carry. The Independent cut to the chase, describing her 2004 breakthrough album Carbon Glacier as having “the air of an instant classic”, while The New York Times likened her songs to poems – “they’re careful, word-conscious, narrative, neither foggy nor overwritten, and tend to give you a take on regular life experience that you don’t quite expect”. That her occasional backing band revel in the name of The Tortured Souls hints that Laura’s music is not exactly an all-out carnival of sunshine sounds. Sparse, spare and hauntingly hushed, her soft folk (flavoured by whispers of chilling blues) was expanded on last year’s Year Of Meteors set which, while dispensing with a good deal of her calling-card austerity, was no less enthralling. Among all of this weekend’s big noise, find a quiet corner for Laura Veirs.Catch This If You Like… Gillian Welch or Jenny Lewis