Meg Baird Furling Review: A Heady Collage of Folk, Roots, and Mood Music

The green leaf reaching toward the sky on the cover of Meg Baird’s fourth solo album, Furling, suggests the birth of a new life cycle. Yet the songs on the album are also often tense or ambiguous, perhaps a reminder that nature isn’t always a benevolent force, a notion that’s hinted at in the title of “Ashes, Ashes.”

Baird’s dreamy music bridges several different iterations of folk. The San Francisco-based singer-songwriter’s family has roots in Appalachia, the music of which was an early influence on her. And she got her start as a professional musician in the Philly psychedelic freak-folk band the Espers, which she co-founded in the early 2000s.

Baird possesses a high, yearning voice the evokes folk singers like Sandy Denny and Joan Baez. Her ethereal vocal style favors melody over clear enunciation, which places the focus more squarely on her music, particularly its darker elements. “Ashes, Ashes,” for example, sets the tone for the album: Baird’s vocals are largely wordless, while the track’s piano chords and drums trudge slowly toward a destination that they never quite reach.

Only “Will You Follow Me Home?” comes close to a more conventional rock structure, with a hooky guitar riff and propulsive rhythm section. For the most part, Furling remains atmospheric, evoking the smeared pigments of a French Impressionist painting. On “Wreathing Days,” Baird’s voice is accompanied by clusters of jazzy piano notes, forming dissonant chords.

While country and roots music inform many of the arrangements here, slide and steel guitars are employed mostly as texture, creating a blur of sound. This is very much “vibes” music, emanating from a wide swath of influences, blending English folk, American roots music, and dubby trip-hop in ways that are both heady and nebulous.