Kathleen Edwards
Voyageur
(Zoe/Rounder)
A-

Review By Brian Baker

 
After a trio of relatively acclaimed albums, particularly 2005’s Back to Me, which spawned a clutch of great soundtrack songs and a pair of Juno nominations, singer-songwriter Kathleen Edwards must realize that she’s found her niche. Her penchant for observing gritty little slices of life, setting those quirkily universal stories to a brilliantly melancholy melody and delivering the package in a contemporary folk/Americana atmosphere accompanied by her tremulous north-of-the-border Suzanne Vega-tinged voice has garnered her a fiercely loyal audience and a press kit packed with confidence-boosting reviews.

Given all that, Edwards didn’t need to tweak her presentation on Voyageur, her fourth full length, and while she and co-producer/Bon Iver frontman Justin Vernon don’t stray impossibly far from her core sound, they do inject interesting new textures into the proceedings. There are moments that lilt with Edwards’ standard shimmering beauty (“Empty Threat,” “House Full of Empty Rooms”), others that bristle with Crazy Horse intensity (“Mint”) and still others with haunting crystalline filigrees that cling to her songs like frost on a windowpane (“Chameleon/Comedian,” “A Soft Place to Land,” the noisily quiet seven-minute closer “For the Record”).

As always, Edwards laces it all together with lyrics that are incisive, revealing and heartbreakingly true (“You don’t kiss me not the way that I wish you would/Maybe I don’t look at you in a way that makes you think you should/So I been thinking about how it’s gonna be, years of giving up your dreams...”), the difference being that she turns her focus inward this time, particularly in the wake of her divorce from husband/collaborator Colin Cripps and her new relationship with Vernon. There was never any doubt about Voyageur’s potential goodness, but with Justin Vernon’s able assistance, Kathleen Edwards has achieved greatness.