On her second album,
Vera Sola's
Danielle Aykroyd makes it clear where she's coming from; it's when she's coming from that feels like an enticing mystery. She began blending genres and eras on 2018's
Shades, reviving heartbroken girl-group pop from the 1960s on one song and crooning a seemingly ancient parable on the next. As she contemplates the past and how we reckon with it on
Peacemaker,
Vera Sola reimagines the traditions of folk, country, and vocal pop even more skillfully. This is due partly to the album's striking instrumentation and arrangements. Instead of recording on her own, as she did with
Shades, this time she enlisted co-producer
Kenneth Pattengale and over a dozen supporting musicians. Leading a bigger creative team,
Vera Sola's vision feels all the more singular on
Peacemaker. Lavish strings shift from fluttering to queasy as betrayal curdles into delusion on "Desire Path," a
Brenda Lee song from an alternate dimension. This slightly unhinged elegance continues on the Latin-tinged noir of "Get Wise" and "Is That You?," a seance of a song that drifts by on spectral pedal steel.
Peacemaker also showcases the firepower of
Vera Sola's music, channeling the energy of her live shows in "The Line"'s frenzied surf and post-punk hybrid and "Blood Bond"'s mid-song transformation from a lament to a blazing anthem ignited by her formidable vibrato. Her voice and lyrics more than hold their own against the album's dramatic sonics on songs such as "I'm Lying," where her rippling guitar and whispered untruths are layered with filmic tension and pacing, or the swirling prologue "Bad Idea," where she envisions the consequences of society's willingness to "take tomorrow out on loan" as a raging forest fire.
Vera Sola's blurring of past and present sounds especially apt to the early 2020s here, but more often,
Peacemaker's dreamlike world has a timeless appeal that fans of
Calexico,
Timber Timbre, and
Marissa Nadler will love. ~ Heather Phares
