When this reporter interviewed a heavily pregnant Laura Veirs in 2010, she was confident motherhood would not affect her career. “What you do is take your life and make your child part of it. Rather than changing your whole life around to accommodate your child.” After she had her daughter, however, it dawned on her that things wouldn’t quite match her expectations.
In the first year, she suffered a peculiar strain of writer’s block. It wasn’t that she couldn’t come up with songs. The problem was that the music struck her as too sappy and touchy feely, too bathed in the loving glow of parenthood. So she took time away and started over. Returning with her first record in nearly four years, it’s obvious that the bliss of being a mother has faded. In fact that’s an understatement: recorded with her husband and long-term producer Tucker Martine, Warp And Weft is perhaps the bleakest record she’s yet recorded. You know you’re in for a bumpy ride when a track with the, at first inspection, uplifting title of ‘Sun Song’ turns out to be a melancholic fever dream. Things don’t get much cheerier. Accompanied by a chiming piano, ‘Finister Sees The Angels’ is a dirge that seems to be addressed to a recently passed love-one, while ‘Ghosts Of Louisville’ is as haunting as the title suggests.
For all that, the album is far from a depressive affair. A talented arranger, Veirs upholsters her songs with surprise curlicues and experimental flourishes. They don’t quite keep the darkness at bay but they do ensure Warp And Weft isn’t as relentlessly torrid as it might have been.

Key Track: 'Finister Sees The Angels'

Out on August 16.