Low Anthem's frontier reverie
The electricity stayed on at the First Unitarian Church on Friday night, but if storms had felled the power lines, the Low Anthem could have continued with only a few tweaks to the set list. The Providence, R.I., quartet's hour-long show was half over before they hooked up anything more elaborate than the house PA, relying instead on an assortment of acoustic instruments ranging from commonplace guitar and drums to rustic throwbacks like pump organ, harmonium, and a handmade music box.
The electricity stayed on at the First Unitarian Church on Friday night, but if storms had felled the power lines, the Low Anthem could have continued with only a few tweaks to the set list. The Providence, R.I., quartet's hour-long show was half over before they hooked up anything more elaborate than the house PA, relying instead on an assortment of acoustic instruments ranging from commonplace guitar and drums to rustic throwbacks like pump organ, harmonium, and a handmade music box.
With their ragged hair and shaggy whiskers, the band's men looked like hippie woodsmen, while multi-instrumentalist Jocie Adams wore a dress out of Little House on the Prairie. But their rough-hewn exterior belied the band members' Ivy League backgrounds: Singer Ben Knox Miller and bassist Jeff Prystowsky studied classical composition at Brown with Adams, who worked briefly for NASA. For "This God Damn House," Miller enlisted the audience in adding a layer of undulating cell-phone feedback that rose in the air like the cry of a forgotten bird.
With the major-label rerelease of their second album, Oh My God, Charlie Darwin, last year, the Low Anthem were showered with public-radio love, and they're still in hot demand from the NPR set. After his voice broke straining for the falsetto notes of "Charlie Darwin," Miller thanked the crowd for cutting him some slack, explaining they'd played five shows in 36 hours.
Drawing equally from Charlie Darwin and their recently recorded third album, the Low Anthem spun a kind of frontier reverie, evoking the frosty beauty of Leonard Cohen and the woodshedding eclecticism of the Band, with whose "Evangeline" they closed out the show, circling a single microphone as if performing on an old-time radio show. They swapped instruments after every song - Adams added lilting clarinet to the Cohenesque "Ticket Taker" and contributed a stinging electric blues solo to the traditional "Don't Let Nobody Turn You Around" - and Miller's voice changed shape to fit each arrangement, from the sandy purr of "To Ohio" to the rasping shout of "The Horizon Is a Beltway." By then, they were fully electrified (or at least as close as they got), but they had plenty of juice whether they were plugged in or not.