Violinist Sarah Alden and Her Band Play One of the Year’s Funnest, Most Counterintuitive Shows at Barbes

Violinist Sarah Alden is a founding member of the late, great Luminescent Orchestrii, who were as definitive, and multistylistically amazing, as any New York circus rock band ever was. After that boisterous unit was pretty much finished, she put out a similarly brilliant 2013 album, Fists of Violets, her first as a fulltime frontwoman. Since then she’s been in demand in both bluegrass and Eastern European folk circles. She’s also got a long-awaited new album, Up to the Sky, due out momentarily. A copule of weeks ago at Barbes, she and the band treated the crowd to a sneak peek that was as eclectic and adrenalizing as any other project she’s been involved with up to this point, which says a lot.

With Rima Fand on violin and piano, Kyle Sanna on guitar, Matthias Kunzli on drums and Ben Gallina on bass, Alden opened with a reggae tune. Uh oh, was this going to be just a pale approximation, like the Zach Brown Band? Nopr. The rhythm section had a great time with it; it was like watching Bob Marley’s drum-and-bass team backing a spiky, kinetic chamber pop band. Sanna jangled enigmatically as the album’s swaying title track got underway, Alden leading the group up to a catchy, Talking Heads-like peak on the chorus, both the strings and vocal harmonies swirling with acidic, Bartok-like close harmonies that quickly turned out to be one of this group’s most distinctive traits. “Strangers are we,” Alden and Fand harmonized with a similar edge to kick off the number after that, a mashup of 70s folk-rock and indie classical.

Next was a funky, quirky song with Sanna playing a simple, catchy, circling guitar riff over a trip-hop beat, the violins stabbing at the melody with their pizzicato accents. Alden’s pensive rainy-day vocal intro after that hinted that the song would stay in pastoral territory; instead, the band took it up with a guitar-fueled art-rock gravitas; then the band gave it a doublespeed Keystone Kops scamper. Some of the material reminded of cellist Jody Redhage’s pastoral chamber-pop quartet Rose & the Nightingale; others, like the heartbroken, elegantly crescendoing number that came next, reminded of Tin Hat, when that group has vocals out front.

Fand’s wide-angle, Asian-tinged piano mingled with Sanna’s steadily austere strums under Alden’s airy vocals and violin on the night’s most anthemic tune. After a turn back in a catchy, cyclically bucolic direction, the band picked up the pace with biting, insistent, minor-key guitar funk, like ELO’s Evil Woman but with a better singer out front. Alden credited her childood trips with her grandmother, searching for the grave of a long lost relative in Sugar Grove Cemetery in Wilmington, Ohio, as inspiration for the plaintive, Appalachian-tinged Aunt Viola’s Waltz. From there the band blazed through a careening take of the noir guitar-driven title track from Alden’s previous album, ablaze with sizzling tremolo-picking and cascades from Sanna. Persuaded to play an encore, they did the reggae tune again. Alden’s next gig is a free show at the World Financial Center on December 15 at 5:30 PM; she and the band are also there on the 19th at 4:30 PM.

Vlada Tomova’s Balkan Tales: Amazing Album

This isn’t safe, sanitized folk music: Vlada Tomova’s new album Balkan Tales has a raw, dangerous edge. Anyone who loves the otherworldly tonalities and dark, ominous chromatics of Bulgarian, Balkan and Middle Eastern music will love this – it’s a rich, intense treat, all the way through. The Bulgarian-born singer varies her vocals depending on the lyric, from low and apprehensive, to brassy and plaintively gritty, to absolutely joyous, with the occasional big “wheeeeeee!” at the end of a phrase. Good singers tend to be magnets for good musicians, and Tomova is no exception. While the album’s instrumentation varies widely from song to song, most of them are built around the terse, stately acoustic guitar work of Kyle Senna and bass provided by either Danny Zanker or Sage Reynolds. Oud genius Mavrothi Kontanis adds an especially suspenseful edge on a couple of tracks, including one deliciously low, mysterious solo. The rest of the crew – Uri Sharlin on accordion, Alicia Svigals on violin, Sarah Bowman on cello and Matthias Kunzli on echoey, boomy percussion – shift confidently among the diverse emotions Tomova evokes.

The songs are a mix of traditional material along with some more recent songs whose composers’ identities have not been lost. Senna lights up the second track with a graceful yet biting, chromatically-charged solo: hearing it on a guitar instead of, say, an oud or bouzouki, adds an unusual and interesting texture to the mix. A big ballad by Lubo Alexandrov is gorgeously dark, slow and slinky, with wounded vocals; another by Niko Papaxoglu gets a spare, ghostly, haunted treatment. But Tomova quickly flips the script, following with a wry, trickly rhythmic, irresistibly crescendoing dance tune. One song has a rustic sway much like an Appalachian ballad – before the rhythm shifts and there’s no doubt that it hails from Eastern Europe. Another takes a creepy, two-chord pulse with spiraling wood flute and adds a bit of an acoustic rock edge. Avishai Cohen’s apprehensive muted trumpet imbues one of the later tracks with a pensive, late 60s psychedelic folk-rock feel. The album closes with a suspenseful Kurdish song that works its way from seems like a casual, improvisational intro to a fiery, methodically accelerating, accordion-fueled gallop. Tomova plays Symphony Space this Sunday, Oct 23 at 7 opening for Macedonian wood flute virtuoso Theodosii Spassov; tix are $30 and worth it.