By Stephanie King

On first listen, Laura Veirs’ Wide-Eyed, Legless sounds like a pleasant rip-off of Suzanne Vega’s Left of Center. But while it shares that song’s core melody, it is the striking purity of Veirs’ voice and the song’s glossy production – the musical equivalent of soothing, medicinal Manuka honey – that recalls Vega most vividly. Because while Left of Center is bright and clean in a confrontational way, Wide-Eyed, Legless is muted and spectral, but equally beguiling.

The song’s barely-there intro of muffled chimes that sound variously like dial tones, UFO signals or hospital equipment gracefully sparks into a keening guitar. This delicate, wailing presence is then offset by a tripping, finger-plucking riff that dreams up a warm but unsettling atmosphere made all the more uncanny by Veirs’ crisp vocals.

The song’s creeping rhythm recalls journeys and footsteps, but while the main refrain obsessively chants “no more looking back, looking back, looking back, faded epitaph”, the song is cyclical and claustrophobic, dropping the listener right back where they started. When Wide-Eyed, Legless does open up to strummed guitars and shifts into the major key, the low, brooding strings still lurk in the background. So as Veirs asks a series of archaic, pseudo-romantic questions – “Will you ever more tie up my hair with velvet bows? Will you ever more pull out the splinters from my toes?” – it’s little surprise when she flatly denies these possibilities with the abrupt “I don’t think so”.

But this isn’t just another singer-songwriter bemoaning personal heartbreaks. The song’s character comes from a fairytale world (“Will you ever more” sounds as if it was lifted from the Grimms or Perrault) but sings with a voice so polished as to appear callously detached. This reaches its perfect climax with the lush, seductive repetition of ‘lash’ in the terrific line “lying on a star-crossed lover's map, take the beating lash, lash for lash”.

Coming in at just two minutes, 40 seconds, Wide-Eyed Legless is a fleeting, sickly song for the broken-hearted and abandoned. The song could be much longer, a great epic folktale, but inevitably it would always return to the same insidious refrain, trapped within itself.

Wide-Eyed, Legless appears on Laura Veirs’ seventh album, July Flame, released on 12th January 2010.

More from Stephanie King at Missing Dust Jacket