Plumbiferous Media

Expe­ri­enced, often self-releasing singer-songwriter Laura Veirs released her sev­enth album, July Flame, last week. For her newest release, she has brought in Jim James of My Morn­ing Jacket for backup vocals. Unfor­tu­nately, his oddly placed har­monies and other lines most clearly expose July Flame for what it is, a decent sound­ing but dis­tress­ingly under-thought album. July Flame is a weird com­bi­na­tion of thir­teen songs that sound almost iden­ti­cal, are not really all that inter­est­ing, unique, thought­ful, or cre­ative, and yet some­how man­age to sound, for the most part, good.

At their best, Veirs’ vocals are pleas­ant, at their worst jar­ring. Veirs’ voice fits well with the musi­cal base of the album, falling only occa­sion­ally into dis­so­nance. How­ever, as much of the musi­cal base of the album relies quite heav­ily on rep­e­ti­tion and suf­fers from more-than-unusual lack of pur­pose, this close fit is a weak­ness as much as it is a strength. Veirs’ vocals only really stand out on the best tracks - every­where else they melt into the rest of the music. Jim James’ backup vocals are, unfor­tu­nately, not espe­cially well-used, which is espe­cially notable as much of the music stays below the level of nota­bil­ity - so such a mis­guided deci­sion sticks out substantially.

July Flame’s lyrics are less sup­ple­men­tary than com­ple­men­tary - they’re sim­ply there rather than being a ben­e­fi­cial part of the album. Veirs relies as heav­ily on rep­e­ti­tion in the lyrics of July Flame as with many other ele­ments of the album, such that the lyrics and the story of the album flow by as eas­ily as the least engag­ing musi­cal ele­ments. Excep­tional lines crop up occa­sion­ally, but are far less com­mon than they should be.

In gen­eral, July Flame is nice, even easy to lis­ten to, but by no means unique. Even though the music (both in its indi­vid­ual ele­ments and as a whole) relies all too heav­ily on rep­e­ti­tion, the album is not a com­plete bore. Tracks thank­fully don’t have a ten­dency to quite put the lis­tener to sleep - usu­ally, and it’s hard not to notice the few tracks like “Sum­mer Is the Cham­pion,” which stand out on an album full of tracks that sound exactly like the pre­vi­ous one (prob­a­bly the biggest prob­lem of the album as a whole). These tracks become suc­cess­ful not because of their more active tempo, though it helps, but pri­mar­ily because ele­ments, espe­cially includ­ing instru­men­tals, are sig­nif­i­cantly more devel­oped, allow­ing for a fuller, all-around nicer sound.

It’s hard not to feel that the album is sig­nif­i­cantly under­de­vel­oped, or at least that it was some­what care­lessly con­structed. The very first track has next to no motion or unam­bigu­ous direc­tion. It becomes next to impos­si­ble to tell what is hap­pen­ing (and that’s not to say any­thing is unex­pected). In the end, you sim­ply get lost in the music, and def­i­nitely not in a good way. Other tracks like “Sun is King” and “Life is Good Blues” then serve to con­vince you that har­mony and backup vocals are ran­domly added for absolutely no emo­tional or direc­tional pur­pose, except maybe, occa­sion­ally, to cause some minor annoy­ance. And yet, even as inat­ten­tively con­structed as July Flame is, it still man­ages to some­how sound more good than bad.

Thanks to an over­ar­ch­ing sense of medi­oc­rity, July Flame is more accept­able than truly good. Very few points on the album stand out, so that for the most part July Flame might as well be one long track rather than thir­teen over-similar ones. A num­ber of ill-planned deci­sions don’t help much, though they gen­er­ally enforce medi­oc­rity rather than actu­ally dam­ag­ing the album as a whole. Over­all, July Flame isn’t ter­ri­ble. It’s just not amaz­ing, or even par­tic­u­larly interesting.

This post is tagged 60-69, Laura Veirs