The Spill Magazine The Spill Magazine
The Spill Magazine The Spill Magazine
The Spill Magazine The Spill Magazine
  • Reviews
    • Album Reviews
    • Features
    • Live Reviews
    • Festivals
  • Portraits
  • Headlines
    • News
    • Contests
    • Events
    • Entertainment Headlines
    • Concert Listings
    • Toronto Concert Venues
  • New Music
    • Premieres
    • Track Of The Day
  • Track Of The Week
  • Books + Movies
  • About
  • Reviews
    • Album Reviews
    • Features
    • Live Reviews
    • Festivals
  • Portraits
  • Headlines
    • News
    • Contests
    • Events
    • Entertainment Headlines
    • Concert Listings
    • Toronto Concert Venues
  • New Music
    • Premieres
    • Track Of The Day
  • Track Of The Week
  • Books + Movies
  • About
  • Spill Menu
    • Reviews
      • Album Reviews
      • Features
      • Live Reviews
      • Festivals
    • Portraits
    • Headlines
      • News
      • Contests
      • Events
      • Entertainment Headlines
      • Concert Listings
      • Toronto Concert Venues
    • New Music
      • Premieres
      • Track Of The Day
    • Track Of The Week
    • Books + Movies
    • About
Album Reviews
101
Editor Pick
previous article
SPILL ALBUM REVIEW: SAY SUE ME - WHERE WE WERE TOGETHER
next article
SPILL ALBUM REVIEW: JOSH ROUSE - LOVE IN THE MODERN AGE

SPILL ALBUM REVIEW: LAURA VEIRS – THE LOOKOUT

Laura Veirs
The Lookout
Raven Marching Band

By the time an artist puts out their tenth album, they’ve usually either flattened out creatively, or they produce a record that allows them to explore their musical interestsbut is too idiosyncratic to keep a majority of their listeners’ attention. Laura Veirs’s recent release, the sublimely intricate The Lookout, escapes either fate and unfurls in ways that will both please and excite long-time fans. 

Veirs’s talents as a songwriter and storyteller, from The Triumphs and Travails of Orphan Mae (2001) through Year of Meteors (2005) and on, have, strangely enough, relied on her ability to pile on the adjectives. The Lookout is no different. In contrast to the advice anyone who has ever taken a creative writing class has ever received, Veirs refuses to strip adjectives from her writing. In defiance of these writerly rules, she’s built a career on making descriptive thickness necessary instead of gratuitous. Few songwriters can manage this quite like Veirs; she is nothing if not a seasoned naturalist cataloging the landscape with a precision that demands three words when one will definitely not do. If as a lyricist Veirs has always excelled in excesses that manage not to overwhelm, on The Lookout she has perfected this density musically.

It is this musical complexity that makes each of The Lookout’s 12 songs a miniature archive, and each song has a specific agenda that asks us to listen for its musical referents. The instrumentation that accompanies her stripped-down guitar playing across the album is a testament to the broad repertoire from which Veirs draws. That rich history informs The Lookout, but this is no throwback folk album. Veirs reckons with the past mightily but refuses to shy away from what she is in the present or might yet be in the future.

As fans of Veirs would expect, she does this by examining our interactions with the natural world. “Seven Falls,” the album’s third track, takes us deep into the woods, pairing the comforting Midwestern Ohio piano twang of bands like Over the Rhine with the breezy hopelessness of Otis Redding’s “Sitting on the Dock by the Bay.” The results stop you in your tracks. You’d be hard pressed to find another song that sounds so lazily, sunnily comforting but with such dark lyrics:

“Up past the Seven Falls
Beyond the moody peak
I dove into the lake and called
An icy command for you to join me
How can a child of the sun be so cold?

So cold
Like a planet with no sun floats in the black
I’m old now
And I try to be kind but still sometimes
I’m as cold as that.”

Immediately following “Seven Falls,” “Mountains of the Moon”, a Grateful Dead track, presents us with another twist, giving us with what seems like a traditional English folk ballad. If you’re not listening carefully to the words, you might assume Veirs is singing about maidens and knights and magic. And she is. But as the name of the track makes obvious, Veirs is describing a scene on the moon. This is the deep future rather than the deep past, viewed through the lens of a Ray Bradbury novel that hasn’t been written yet.

The title track serves as The Lookout’s apex. The shortest song on the album, its brevity allows it to operate as the point upon which the album pivots, in an album full of songs that delights in setting up unexpected relationships between objects and subjects. Veirs has described The Lookout as a concept album concerned with fragments and objects and fleeting moments—the kind of ephemeral and transitory bits that we mistakenly and even stupidly ignore. Veirs insists on this album that we pay attention and look closely, and “The Lookout” gives her a companion for her efforts.

Indeed, our salvation as a human race might depend on Veirs’s form of devotional looking, of making the seemingly small and insignificant matter, both physically and symbolically. She achieves this masterfully on the album’s third-to-last track, “Lightning Rod.” “Lightning Rod” sounds most like “Laura Veirs Plays Laura Veirs,” but the echo chorus of children (her own, and a niece) and the synthetic drum track builds up static in the song and gives it friction. Musically, the track conjures older songs, like “Drink Deep” and “Spelunking.” If those songs were about diving in deep into the earth with a beloved by our side, however, “Lightning Rod” looks upwards and outwards, asks us to channel the potential of God and Science, and begs them both to wrack our bodies with energy and force: “You take the heat on the rooftops / You make it sweet oh please don’t stop.” It’s the perfect near-ending to a magnificent and aptly-titled album. A lookout is, after all, a vantage point and a sentry, a warning and a field guide, and Veirs has given us all of these things.



Artist Links

website_flat_2016 facebook_flat_2016 twitter_flat_2016 instagram_flat_2016

Editor Pick
Item Reviewed

SPILL ALBUM REVIEW: LAURA VEIRS – THE LOOKOUT

Author

Michelle Morgan

Here's what we think...
Spill Rating
Fan Rating
Rate Here
New Criteria
10
—
9.0
Total Spill Rating
—
Total Fan Rating
You have rated this
Album Reviews
album reviewalbum reviewslaura veirsraven marching bandseven fallsthe lookout
album review, album reviews, laura veirs, raven marching band, seven falls, the lookout
About the Author
Michelle Morgan
Michelle Morgan is a queer ENFP living in New Haven CT, USofA. By day she works in digital accessibility. By night/weekend, she is an embroidery artist, DJ at 89.5fm WPKN, and purveyor of too muchness. She takes being a Gemini seriously.
RELATED ARTICLES
album reviewalbum reviewsthe lookout
 
8.0
The Dreadnoughts
—

SPILL ALBUM REVIEW: THE DREADNOUGHTS – ROLL AND GO

by Michelle Cooney on June 24, 2022
The Dreadnoughts Roll And Go Stomp Records The Dreadnoughts have been baptized with a variety of classifications, from “cluster folk” to “polka punk” to “ciderpunk”. Their new album, [...]
 
8.0
Dylan Moon

SPILL ALBUM REVIEW: DYLAN MOON – OPTION EXPLORE

by Ljubinko Zivkovic on June 17, 2022
Dylan Moon Option Explore RVNG Intl. Anybody who had a chance to hear Dylan Moon’s initial album Only the Blues, from 2019 might be taken aback by what is in the grooves (or bits) [...]
 
8.0
1st Base Runner

SPILL ALBUM REVIEW: 1st BASE RUNNER – LIGHT ROARS

by Ljubinko Zivkovic on June 13, 2022
1st Base Runner Light Roars Independent Tim Husmann, aka 1st Base Runner has been on a hot streak for a few years now with his brand of dark, electronic modern gothic-oriented sounds, [...]
 
8.0
The Dream Syndicate

SPILL ALBUM REVIEW: THE DREAM SYNDICATE – ULTRAVIOLET BATTLE HYMNS AND TRUE CONFESSIONS

by Ljubinko Zivkovic on June 10, 2022
The Dream Syndicate Ultraviolet Battle Hymns And True Confessions Fire Records The Dream Syndicate came, dropped a few brilliant modern psych [...]
 
8.0
Wardruna

SPILL ALBUM REVIEW: WARDRUNA – KVITRAVN – FIRST FLIGHT OF THE WHITE RAVEN

by Samantha Wu on June 10, 2022
Wardruna Kvitravn – First Flight Of The White Raven Music For Nations/Sony Music/Columbia Germany/Bynorse Einar Selvik is the storyteller and mastermind [...]

Latest Album Reviews
View All
 
SPILL ALBUM REVIEW: THE DREADNOUGHTS – ROLL AND GO
8.0
—
 
SPILL ALBUM REVIEW: DYLAN MOON – OPTION EXPLORE
8.0
 
SPILL ALBUM REVIEW: 1st BASE RUNNER – LIGHT ROARS
8.0
 
SPILL ALBUM REVIEW: THE DREAM SYNDICATE – ULTRAVIOLET BATTLE ...
8.0
 
SPILL ALBUM REVIEW: WARDRUNA – KVITRAVN – FIRST FLIGHT ...
8.0

Tweets by @spillmagazine

SPILL MAGAZINE MENU
  • Home | The Spill Magazine
  • Premieres
  • Track Of The Week
  • Album Reviews
  • Books + Movies
  • Features
  • Live Reviews
  • Festivals
  • Portraits
  • News
  • Events
  • Entertainment Headlines
  • Concert Listings
  • Toronto Concert Venues
  • About Us
  • Contests
  • New Music
  • Spill Magazine Contributors
  • TOTD
  • Privacy Policy
  • The Scene Unseen
  • Newsletter

Copyright © 2022 | The Spill Magazine
All Rights Reserved.

TRENDING RIGHT NOW
   
 
SPILL FEATURE: CRUISE TO THE EDGE 2022 – THIS YEAR’S PROG CRUISE MAKES A LOT OF NOISE. A WHOLE LOT OF NOISE.
750
 
SPILL ALBUM REVIEW: PRIMUS – CONSPIRANOID
593
 
SPILL FEATURE: DON’T YOU FEEL CLOSER? – A CONVERSATION WITH CY CURNIN OF THE FIXX
585
 
SPILL ALBUM REVIEW: THE FIXX – EVERY FIVE SECONDS
472
 
SPILL NEWS: BARENAKED LADIES TO RELEASE LIVE TRACKS FROM SOLD-OUT ROYAL ALBERT HALL SHOW | DELUXE EDITION OF ‘DETOUR DE FORCE’ OUT JUNE 3
343
 
SPILL ALBUM REVIEW: NAZARETH – SURVIVING THE LAW
340
 
SPILL VIDEO PREMIERE: LOST CAT – “L.O.S.T.”
329
 
SPILL LIVE REVIEW: NIGHTWISH w/ BEAST IN BLACK @ HISTORY, TORONTO
320
 
SPILL ALBUM REVIEW: LUCIUS – SECOND NATURE
289
 
SPILL ALBUM REVIEW: DOROTHY – GIFTS FROM THE HOLY GHOST
276
 
SPILL ALBUM REVIEW: FANTASTIC NEGRITO – WHITE JESUS BLACK PROBLEMS
274
 
SPILL ALBUM REVIEW: AVI KAPLAN – FLOATING ON A DREAM
271
 
SPILL LIVE REVIEW: KRAFTWERK @ MASSEY HALL, TORONTO
236
ENTERTAINMENT HEADLINES