Laura Gibson Issue #39

Beasts Of Seasons

By Christine Werthman
Published: March 1st, 2009 | 3:06pm

Being a female singer-songwriter lands ladies some pretty standard comparisons. If she’s super folksy, she’s a Joan Baez. If she has a talent for writing intensely personal lyrics, she’s a Joni Mitchell. In the case of Laura Gibson: she’s a Feist.

It’s not Gibson’s style of playing on her nylon-string guitar or her sweet and gentle melodies that garner the comparison. The likeness is all in her voice. Gibson has that same soft, whispery quality in her voice, and she sings notes with the same Feist approach of starting strong and then letting her vocals crack and fade as she sustains the sound.

Beasts Of Seasons is Gibson’s second full-length album, and the album has the Portland-based musician maintaining a sound consistent with 2006’s If You Come To Greet Me but with some of the sparseness filled in with dense instrumentation, including drums, piano, saw, banjo, and backing vocalists. Even though Gibson has colored some of the spaces in her sound, nothing falls too heavily on the ears: “Funeral Songs” keeps the daintiness of Gibson’s music but supplies a memorable melody, while the only song on the album that seems to have any backbone, “Spirited,” sounds like it walks with an intention rather than aimlessly wandering like the balance of Beasts Of Seasons.