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ARTiST....: laura gibson
TiTLE.....: beasts of seasons
LABEL.....: Souterrain Transmissions
GENRE.....: indie
SOURCE....: cdda
ENCODER...: i'm too lame to change the defaul
SiZE......: 46,8 MB
REL.DATE..: nov-05-2009
Catalognr.: n/a
Quality...: VBRkbps / 44,1kHz / joint
Url.......: n/a
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01] shadows on parade 07:33
02] come by storm 04:17
03] spirited 03:17
04] postures bent 03:43
05] funeral songs 03:53
06] where have all your good 03:41
07] sleeper 04:42
08] sweet deception 04:30
09] glory 04:01
TOTAL TiME : 39:37 min
from pitchfork.com:
The Pacific Northwest coughs up folksy,
understated singer-songwriters by the
coffeehouseful, which puts Portland-based Laura
Gibson at risk of getting lost in the crowd. That
would be a shame: Gibson has more to offer than
vague descriptors like "folksy" and "understated"
would suggest, and besides, her music is far
better suited to a fireplace and a cup of warm
apple cider than to your local Starbucks. Raised
in a tiny coastal town, the soft-spoken songstress
inched quietly into the scene in 2006 with If You
Come to Greet Me, her refreshingly homespun if
sometimes staid full-length debut. At first blush,
the follow-up, Beasts of Seasons, doesn't appear
to mark a significant departure from its
predecessor. But unravel its seemingly rudimentary
faτade and you'll find an affecting study in
contrasts from a songwriter a good deal more
sophisticated than she's generally willing to let
on.
At the core of this study is a thematic concept of
Gibson's own design. She's divided the record
roughly in half; "Communion Songs" comprise the
first part, while the second is made up of
"Funeral Songs". Yet the two ideas are hardly
mutually exclusive, a notion Gibson makes evident
in the opening song, seven and a half minutes of
gently cascading majesty entitled "Shadows on
Parade". Apart from evoking the passage of time,
the song's central image-- "I will watch the
shadows on parade"-- suggests the solitude,
repose, and even isolation of the lonely and the
waiting. With Gibson's "parade" description,
however, the solitary activity of shadow-watching
becomes something contrastingly communal and
celebratory, a point underscored by the sample of
a distant drum corps and crowd she and producer
Tucker Martine (the Decemberists, Sufjan Stevens,
Mudhoney) use to close out the song. It's the
first of many little moments on the record that
illustrate Gibson's willingness to see an image
through at a time when a lot of similar
songwriters are content to settle for what "feels
good" or "sounds good" and move along.
Shadow-watching gives way to other pensive
activities as Beasts continues: reminiscence,
daydreams, diary-like appeals to an unnamed
"other", and the meditations on mortality that
mark the "Funeral" half of the record. "If these
bare walls could sing," Gibson begins on the
transitional track "Funeral Songs"-- is she still
watching and waiting for something even after the
sunset has extinguished that parade of shadows?
Indeed, a line about a body "swaying like a
drunkard" and a trio of ruminations on Gibson's
mother, father, and sister on closing track
"Glory" are among the few moments where we're
transported from Gibson's head to someplace
outside. Yet for all of the singer's insularity,
she never sounds alone on Beasts of Seasons,
thanks to a mostly exquisite array of backing
arrangements courtesy of a host of PDX luminaries,
including Laura Veirs, labelmate Shelly Short, and
members of the Decemberists, M. Ward's band,
Menomena, and Norfolk & Western. "Spirited",
easily the record's liveliest track, gets a boost
from a chorus of "OOH-ooh-OOH"s and booming
percussion-work that keep things moving at a
steady cantor, while "Where Have All Your Good
Words Gone?"'s fatalistic imagery rubs up against
foreboding timpani rolls and chilly fiddle-playing
that calls to mind Death bowing the buried to life
in Saint-Saδns' Danse Macabre.
As a singer, Gibson treats syllables with the same
patience and loving precision a mosaic maker might
put into cutting and arranging his/her tiles. It
comes as little surprise, then, that words are a
lyrical preoccupation of Gibson's throughout
Beasts of Seasons. On "Come By Storm", the singer
recalls how she "took great care with words," and,
later, how she loses herself to them. "Spirited"
finds her describing how "morning tends to... turn
our words to smoke," while the aforementioned
"Where Have All Your Good Words Gone?" has her
grappling with the loss of a loved one by asking,
"Where are all the pleasures from the timbre of
your tongue?" Yet for all her talk of words,
Gibson allows herself a fairly limited lexicon on
Beasts of Seasons. If she knows some "good" ones
like her sesquipedalian-prone onetime tourmate and
fellow Portlander Colin Meloy, she wisely forgoes
them in favor of repeated references to bodies and
bones, trees and tongues, pictures, poems, and
stories-- all of which lend the record a
reflexivity that rewards repeat listens.
Matthew Solarski, March 17, 2009
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