To date, Laura Veirs hasn’t topped the songstress stakes. She lacks some of Cat Power’s sultry passion and she’s a little more bookish. She doesn’t possess the vocal tempest of Neko Case (who literally sang as a tornado last year), but Veirs has never sounded like one to pitch a disaster movie. She puts out slow-burners like July Flame, and with it she deserves a place amongst the best of them.

Thematically, the album is strongly grounded in mid-summer. The balmy images are ample - buzzing fireflies, daffodil fields, riverside dances - but Veirs can’t quite break her slight forlorn streak and the music doesn’t relay the straightforward, hazy connotations of an August campfire. Instead there’s an underlying delicacy, an awareness of the temporality of the season.

In fact, occasionally troubled times are more focal, as with the lyrics of hornet poison and lashings on ‘Wide-Eyed, Legless’, and there’s a sense that Veirs has recently dealt with emotional upheaval. But if there’s a message underpinning July Flame, it’s that she spent the summer convalescing - canning windfalls and bottling hone - and by the song’s end she’s proclaiming “No more looking back/faded epitaph”. Eventually she’s even idolising Carol Kaye, the bassist who played on the most unabashedly jubilant music of our time.

Regardless of what bought it on, the peaceful resolve suits her. The best songs here (the title track, ‘Life Is Good Blues’, ‘Summer Is The Champion’) all combine sweet temperate odes, hints of the organic and a little edge of fragility. If it’s possible to write a soft, reserved paean to living through the summer, Veirs has it here. It's a hard trick to make economy seem meaningful; where the simple plucking of a banjo is more moving than a claw-hammered solo, where understatement is still effusive, where essentially sparse songs speak volumes. At the centre of July Flame’s success is well-crafted reticence.

This is Veirs’ seventh album, but it still seems as ripe and abundant as the peach of the title. When she’s writing songs this good, I don’t see July Flame signalling a fade into the autumn of her career.

Dylan Williams