Laura Stevenson
by Laura Snapes
Punk-turned-country-leaning chronicler Laura Stevenson's third album is her first with an outside producer, Kevin McMahon, who's previously worked with Titus Andronicus and Swans. It's also the first where she's decided to deal with her demons.
"Runner" — Laura StevensonVia SoundCloud
On punk-turned-country-leaning chronicler Laura Stevenson's first album, 2010's A Record, she was frank about her tendency to obscure her feelings. The precious, old-timey piano waltz of "Beets United" found her intoning, in her sweet vinegar voice, "I need to stop singing in code/ To start ringing true because true rings only." But it's taken her until her third LP-- the second for Don Giovanni-- to feel she's reached that point. She's also dropped …and the Cans from her stage name (though they remain her backing band) and decided to deal with her demons: the realization that death is inevitable, and the ensuing battle between succumbing to futility, self-destruction, or balancing somewhere between the two. "There comes a time when you decide if you fight it off or learn to die," she sings on "Triangle", her snarl slight over her band's crunching, good-timey wallop. It's heavy stuff, but you wouldn't immediately know it just by listening to Wheel, which spins a line in folk-rock bonhomie so sincere that a few gnarled sticks thrown in its spokes wouldn't go amiss.
The 28-year-old Long Islander isn't exactly an open book on Wheel, but sticks to a neat scheme of metaphors to dress up her existential anguish. The characters in her songs are either trapped, cowed within disintegrating bodies (Stevenson is a big Jeff Mangum fan, and it shows), hiding away from the world, still living within damaging, inescapable situations; or they're trying to run, though beyond the general idea of escape, towards what and why is never that obvious. (Though the record's most quotable line doesn't fit either foot: "You'll be a home for ungrateful drones who will churn your bones to butter," she rails on "Swim Swim", where California gets swallowed up by an earthquake and bees set down roots.)
Problem is, if Stevenson's lyrics are desperate and raw, her and her band's music bowls along blithely, neutering her newly on-show, distinct personal anguish: The sugary gait of "Renee" and "The Move"'s simpering softness fall halfway between I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning-era Bright Eyes and the slightly self-satisfied cadence of popular, modern British folk. Standout single "Runner" is a weird, twangy anthem with a pop-punkish chorus ("This summer hurts! This summer hurts!") that nods to Stevenson's teenage obsession with Green Day and Operation Ivy. "Bells and Whistles" has similarly overflowing verses and indignant, punchy choruses to Lady Lamb the Beekeeper's recent album, Ripely Pine, but lacks Aly Spaltro's taste for blood; "Every Tense" is strings-swollen and grave, like Sigur Rós making Americana, "Telluride" the flagging third hour of a Bruce Springsteen outdoor show. You get the picture: Stevenson and band cover the full spectrum of 21st century populist folk, from hushed intimacy to torrid crescendo and dusk-lit festival stage rousing, a touch like latter-period Rilo Kiley.
Wheel is Stevenson's first record with an outside producer: Kevin McMahon has previously worked with Titus Andronicus and Swans, so he should be a dab hand at managing vim and dread, but the thick arrangements and too-poignant string interludes often make Stevenson's lyrics difficult to hear properly, and their tendency toward generic twang and climax gets old quickly. Wheel is accomplished, but does next to nothing you haven't heard before and offers no original thrills.
It's no means an unpleasant record, however, and Stevenson is a winsome presence with a wild voice, and an occasional knack for compellingly weird hybrids; "Runner" and the Fiona Apple-does-Built to Spill vibe of "Eleonora" put a halfway idiosyncratic spin on theatrical, muscular folk rock. But it's Laura Stevenson's third album, and the third that leaves you feeling warmly disposed but unconvinced, gamely professing your interest to see what she does next time around. The rub is that the notion of potential unfulfilled is in part responsible for crushing her songs on this record, aspiring to templates and rafters that definitely don't ring as true as Stevenson's vividly impressionistic, twisted lyrics and psyche.