|
PHOSPHORESCENT / DEER TICK / MEGAFAUN
Tuesday Mar 24, 2009 8:00 PM
Musicians often head to New York, it‘s a familiar story. But something magical happened when Matthew Houck picked up stakes halfway and moved to Brooklyn from Athens, Georgia.
Raised in Alabama, Houck has always made music steeped in the Southern-gothic tradition, a sweet American folk soaked in atmosphere like a pound cake in rum. Our weary-voiced bandleader cemented his reputation for making masterpiece albums filled with hallelujahs for both grace and tragedy with songs that swung from ramshackle and joyous to broken and pleading in the space of a prayer. The live show swung along this arc ñ with Houck sometimes backed by up to 14 or 15 members ñ creating a full-blown, shambling, marching-brass-band-revival-tent celebration.
Phosphorescent will be on tour in support of the new album To Willie due out on February 3rd.
Brooklyn's Deer Tick and Durham's Megafaun are set to open.
This show is for ages 18 and up.
Tickets for this show are $10.
Doors at 8pm.
PHOSPHORESCENT | 8:00 PM
 usicians often head to New York, it‘s a familiar story. But something magical happened when Matthew Houck picked up stakes halfway through making his new Phosphorescent record, Pride, and moved to Brooklyn from Athens, Georgia.
Raised in Alabama, Houck has always made music steeped in the Southern-gothic tradition, a sweet American folk soaked in atmosphere like a pound cake in rum. On 2005‘s Aw Come Aw Wry, our weary-voiced bandleader cemented his reputation for making masterpiece albums filled with hallelujahs for both grace and tragedy with songs that swung from ramshackle and joyous to broken and pleading in the space of a prayer. The live show swung along this arc ñ with Houck sometimes backed by up to 14 or 15 members ñ creating a full-blown, shambling, marching-brass-band-revival-tent celebration.
Pride, Phosphorescents last album, is something different. While it‘s not without the moments of sheer abandon that have made Phosphorescent‘s work unmistakable--"At Death, A Proclamation" thunders into familiar territory--mostly gone are the messy marching bands and evangelical fervor. Here, Houck instead channels something more mystical and haunting, offering up a dark, meditative set of songs that is all the more spiritual-sounding for its restrained tone. On previous albums, he‘s recruited guest musicians to fill the gaps, but on Pride, Houck has only enlisted the services of a makeshift choir, otherwise recording every instrument himself. His achingly cerebral delivery recalls Arthur Russell, but honestly, Pride sounds like nothing else we‘ve ever heard. These are poems uttered in an empty field, punctuated by shouts and hollers, as if from a singer either abandoned or possessed. The lyrics are Houck‘s strongest ever, wrapped in washed out choral etudes that could be channeled from a rural French chapel or a solemn African tribe in prayer.
Pride sounds like it was made by a man set free. In fact, Pride sounds broken free of time and place altogether. Yet still it is warm, familiar, and welcoming--a record to call home.
To Willie, the most recent record, will be released on the Dead Oceans record label on February 3rd.
more >>> |
MEGAFAUN | 8:00 PM
 On their debut Bury The Square, Raleigh-via-Eau Clair trio Megafaun neatly splice together different strands of sounds, whether it's tape manipulated hoedowns ("Tired And Troubled") mournful, slow-blooming banjo-and-white-noise-laced epics ("Where We Belong"), or the rural barbershop doo wop of "Find Your Mark." Focusing on a wide palette of instrumentation, but always coming back to their soaring three-part harmonies, it's easy to see why Akron/Family contacted them out of the blue and asked them to support them on a six-week tour: Megafaun opens, then joins Akron plus excellent sound manipulator Greg Davis on-stage as a supergroup of sorts. When they're on their own as Megafaun, the group consists of brother Brad and Phil Cook, along with Joe Westerlund. All three played in DeYarmond Edison with Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), and Brad co-owns Burlytime Records (with Pitchfork scribe Grayson Currin), the label that put out Bowerbirds and Horseback last year. Enough talking points? Take a listen to "Find Your Mark" and "Lazy Suicide," a countrified junk shop ramble, after the jump. - Stereogum
more >>> |
DEER TICK | 8:00 PM
Deer Tick is a rock n roll band originally from Providence, Rhode Island. They have been labeled things like alt-country, and freak folk, which the band finds a little weird. Are things like "alt" and "freak" necessary to describe Deer Tick? Deer Tick doesn't think so.
more >>> |
|
|
Find PHOSPHORESCENT / DEER TICK / MEGAFAUN on...
|
 
|
|
|
|
|
Music
|
|