Toaster Full of Women

Side note: Hey, if it's you, would you please stop killing all the great soul singers out there?

>> Featured Artist: Laura Veirs

Well, Ms. Veirs opened up last night in Alexandria, Va., for last week's Toaster Artist, the always-charming Colin Meloy. Who can pass up an artist whose name is a sentence?

Her set was about 30-percent really solid songs like "Spelunking"; 45 percent of material that mostly just set a nice mood for the evening of glassed singer-songwriters singin' 'round a non-existent campire; and the remaining quarter of songs that decayed into a self-indulgent loop pedal exercise (seriously, leave it home, Laura. We'd rather just hear you sing normal-like).

"Spelunking" (off Year of Meteors) really grabbed the Toaster with its pretty fingerpicked geeter and Veirs' lush, layered vox that reminds us all of Kathleen Edwards. Preliminary research reveals that spelunking is some sort of outdoor activity. More on this to come...


>> Album Lookout: The Greatest

Cat Power - Released: Jan. 24 on Matador

Apparently, Jan. 24 was the day to release an album, as all three of the Toaster's Album posts thus far were released from the artists' womb last Tuesday. Cat Power has always been treading water, keeping her head afloat, in the Toaster's lush catalog of MP3s we don't listen to enough. And now she's broken loose.

A holiday monetary gift was exchanged for the pink, shiny album this week and has once again proved that file-sharing can lead to album sales -- not just homeless musicians.

"Could We" is on this new release, which features a title that is simultaneously a little confusing and seemingly pompous. All we can say is this is the best lazy-Sunday album of the year thus far. Put your Norah Jones comparisons away; Cat Power deserves better.


>> Reverting to: 1969 (again)

"After Hours" - Everyone who's ever started a band because of The Velvet Underground's first album probably would have also put this at the tail end of a mix tape -- you know, in the way "Her Majesty" put a nightcap on Abbey Road.

It's our favorite song to sing late at night or when the curtain's going down or when someone left the dishes on the living room table (maybe due to the "wine glass" lyric...?).