Since we last heard from Laura Gibson, the supple-voiced singer/songwriter moved from Portland, Ore., to New York City, enrolled in an MFA program and lost all her stuff in a gas explosion. You can look for all of that in the lyrics of Empire Builder, but this record’s got bigger stuff on its mind: growing, finding. Love looms large on this LP, but while Gibson is often humane, she’s not always gentle. The teeth come out on the solemnly insistent “Not Harmless,” while the moody “The Cause” pulses with a hip-shaking beat.
Standout track “Two Kids” captures all the frenetic diehardism of youth in elegant, moving verses that would’ve fit pretty snugly on Tigermilk. The kids “trade a roof for the open sky, living on luck, tethering our hopes to a pickup truck” before making the sort of declarations only the naïve and the doomed can make: “If we’re gonna die young, we’re gonna die with a love song in our mouths.” It’s just the loveliest fucking song on an album full of them.
—Patrick Rapa
