Kathleen Edwards - Voyageur I feel that I should say up front that any reservations I have about Kathleen Edwards and her work are entirely my own issues. Since her 2002 debut Failer, I've enjoyed her honest, roots-rock fare but always felt like I expected more from her creatively even though across her first three albums, she'd never shown any signs that she had ambitions beyond being a good singer-songwriter. That said, the fact that she spent her downtime following 2008′s Asking For Flowers songwriting with John Roderick of The Long Winters and becoming romantically/artistically involved with Justin Vernon of Bon Iver made me think that perhaps her fourth record would represent that creative hard left that for whatever reason I kept expecting her to take. So just to get it out of the way, Voyageur, out today, is not that game-changing record. It does, however, represent a significant enough shift in Edwards' modus operandi to be noteworthy and is arguably her best effort to date. She's shed much of the country-rock accouterments of her earlier records and the more narrative songwriting structures for an approach that's more sonically expansive and more thematically raw, but has balanced out that weightiness with some of her catchiest pop compositions to date in "Change The Sheets" and "Sidecar". It's surprising that two of the most personal and pensive numbers on the record - "Pink Champagne" and "A Soft Place To Land" - would be the Roderick co-writes; I'd have expected different lessons to be learned from one of the smartest power-pop songwriters around, but again perhaps that's teaching me to think I know what to expect. Similarly, looking for Vernon's overt fingerprints on the record are futile - there's no vocoder or falsetto in effect, even though he contributes backing vocals throughout. Okay, the outro guitar solo(s) on "Going To Hell" are kind of Bon Iver-ish. Whether it came from her collaborators of from within, what's most remarkable about Voyageur is that Edwards is able to step away from her comfort zone just enough to establish a new creative boundaries - and I suspect that these are her boundaries as her voice sounds on the edge of strained at points - without abandoning the touchpoints that her existing fanbase would need to stick around. Maybe I'd have preferred that she went a little bit further - again, I don't know what I mean by that it's just how I feel - but Voyageur is pretty good proof that she knows what she's doing better than I do. Chromewaves				Album reviews Feature articles Interviews Show reviews