Laura Veirs Carbon Glacier LP (Clear & Black Swirl Vinyl)

Carbon Glacier was originally released on CD in 2004, later released on vinyl in 2007. It has been out of print since 2010. It is widely seen as a groundbreaking album in the Laura Veirs canon.

On her Nonesuch debut Carbon Glacier, Veirs reimagines folk music in a bravely boundary-crossing way, employing the genre as a jumping-off point to create an intimate, affecting sound entirely her own.

Veirs' songs are steeped in natural imagery, blending influences ranging from folk to blues to punk. A Seattle (now Portland) resident by way of Colorado, Veirs' background in geology and kinship with the rugged landscape she grew up in meld together with her punk performing roots to form an unusual musical outlook. Her collaborators on Carbon Glacier, The Tortured Souls, reflect this vision of a style that spans rock, jazz, and avant-garde: producer/drummer Tucker Martine has collaborated with Bill Frisell, Jim White, and Modest Mouse; viola player Eyvind Kang performs with Beck and Frisell while leading his own ensemble; Lori Goldston, who toured with Nirvana, plays cello; Steve Moore adds trombone and keyboards; and Karl Blau contributes bass, guitar, and vocals (both Moore and Blau are veterans of the Northwest underground folk and rock community).

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.

This is an oddly beautiful album - far more engaging than you'd expect of one written in a grey Seattle winter, pondering mortality, Moby Dick and the great sheet of blackened ice after which it's named.