A Review of Vera Sola’s Peacemaker & A Prelude to Next Week's Episode (Special Guest - Vera Sola)
By Leon Peter Blanda
Featuring “The Line” from “Peacemaker” By - Vera Sola
Vera Sola is an album artist in an age of the thirty-second, viral TikTok. There is no “Lil Boo Thang” in the collected tracks making up Peacemaker. I say that not to disparage Paul Russell—whose talent I admire greatly— but only to illustrate the dissimilar motives between artists who focus on creating shareable content for terminally online people, and those who focus on cultivating craft as a necessity to fully express themselves.
Peacemaker is a headphones record. Stereo-panned acoustic guitars in the opening track, “Bad Idea,” bounce from ear to ear like binaural beats, setting your mind to the correct frequency needed to absorb this album. Vera Sola, and co-producer Kenneth Pattengale (he of the blissfully harmonic The Milk Carton Kids) paint with a sonic palette that blurs vaudevillian sepia tones, with the soft hues of early Technicolor. Beautifully textured, and organic, Peacemaker is where doom and hope bump up against each other. It’s the scene in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy opens the muted door of the tornado-beaten house, and you see color for the first time.
A flash in the pan burns brightly, but a slow-burning fire leaves its mark in the soil. It’s been said by far wiser scribes than I; the pain of creating art is the point where inspiration ends, and the craft takes over. To keep a fire burning requires craft. There is craft all over this record. Talent? Yes. Inspiration? A-plenty. But talent and inspiration are only the bones of creativity, a disconnected skeleton. Without craft there’s no muscle, no skin, no soul.
While the living ghost of Tom Waits haunts many of these tunes (the drum intro in “I’m Lying” could be a sample of the percussion in Waits’s “Red Shoes by the Drugstore,” from one of my desert island top-five favorite records, Blue Valentine), Vera Sola’s vocal delivery range is more honey than gravel. Sola slides easily between smokey cabaret striptease (in songs like the vampy surf-rock “Get Wise”) and snarling post punk, in tunes like “Blood Bond”—which offers Sola’s live audience the chance to participate in a cathartic call-and-response chorus that would not be out of place in a Misfits song:
Give up your bones,
Give up your bones,
Give up, give up your bones!
Peacemaker displays a bountiful bouquet of singable hooks, but the songs feel more like chapters from a good novel with a dusty cover, than a collection of disparate singles. Not until you’ve absorbed them all will you understand the scope of the whole. While you can listen to any track by itself, and get a small taste of Vera Sola, the breadth of her range, and the entirety of the tale being told is impossible to comprehend without allowing yourself to digest every song. While Peacemaker is not a concept album, there is a complete story to be heard if you journey the expanse.
I can’t speak for Vera Sola, but I stand by my claim that this is an album artist, and not a flash in the pan.
There is soul-crushing heartbreak and righteous anger at the core of Peacemaker, but the hummable melodies, and gorgeous instrumentation, offer hope of a world painted with brilliant pastels. It’s just beyond this black-and-white door we all live behind.
Look for Peacemaker anywhere you buy music, Friday, February 2nd.
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Leon Peter Blanda (1980 - ????) is a writer (freelance), comedian (stand-up), musician (nonpracticing), and self-published author (It still counts, jerks!) from a little town outside New Orleans, Louisiana. He lives near a deadly swamp with his partner, two kids, and a dog named Larry.
His work has appeared in Out All Day: New Orleans, and Story Unlikely.
High Moon, his debut speculative fiction novel, is available now on the website that stole its name from the world’s largest rainforest, and LeonBlanda.com.