A Brooding New Album and a Brooklyn Show from Dark Country Band the Whiskey Charmers

Ann Arbor dark country band the Whiskey Charmers made a big splash with their 2015 debut album. Their new one, The Valley – streaming at Bandcamp – takes their Lynchian twang and shuffle and raises the energy: this is much more of a blue-flame electric rock record. They’re making a rare New York appearance tonight, August 18 at 8 PM at the Way Station, making the trek out to the fringes of Bed-Stuy worth your while.

Lawrence Daversa’s bone-bleached slide guitar builds lingering menace throughout the album’s opening track, Desert, frontwoman/guitarist Carrie Shepard voicing an understatedly lurid scenario that probably doesn’t end well: it’s up to the listener to solve this mystery.

Brian Ferriby’s boomy drumbeat and Daniel “Ozzie” Andrews’ tesely slinky bass propel the defiant, honkytonk-flavored title track, about banishing an evil spirit who could be either dead or very much alive. The simply titled Melody is a straight-up, morose oldschool C&W shuffle: Shepar turns the art of crafting a tune into a metaphor for a relationship that probably won’t go anywhere.

The band returns to loping desert rock in Meet Me There, Shepard’s understatedly simmering vocals channeling hurt and abandonment: “Don’t you care that I was falling down the stairs?” she wants to know. Then Daversa detours into snarling Nashville noir in Dirty Little Blues: that creepy little ch-cha of a bridge is killer.

The band slow things down with the low-key Americana rock burner Fireproof and then bring back the luridly longing ambience in Full Moon, lit up by Daversa’s slashing, vintage elecric Neil Young riffage. And his sinuous, resonant country lines in the bittersweet Songbird might be the the album’s most gorgeous moments, anchored by David Roof’s vividly murky organ.

“Been looking for you lately on my lawn…been looking for you in the back of my car,” Shepard muses in the swaying, melancholy Red Wine. The album’s most epic track is Coal, a majestically gloomy, metaphorically bristling anthem that could be the Dream Syndicate at their countriest, capped off by a searing, careening Daversa solo. The album winds up with Warnings, an Americana-pop song in Halloween disguise. You have been warned: this band is going places. Catch them now before it costs you big bucks at a venue like Bowery Ballroom.

A Richly Retro New Album From Honkytonk Harmony Stars the Sweetback Sisters

With their twangy harmonies, purist oldschool C&W instrumentation, vivid storytelling and omnipresent sense of humor, the Sweetback Sisters sounds like they just stepped offstage at the Grand Old Opry sometime in the mid-50s – or 60s on occasion. Singers Emily Miller and Zara Bode can be totally badass one moment and shatteringly poignant the next. Their previous album Looking For a Fight was a mix of deliciously retro honkytonk and western swing tunes, with a couple of harrowingly lyrical ballads. Their new one King of Killing Time – streaming at Bandcamp – looks back a little further to around 1953, when proto-rock, blues, jazz and pop were all getting cross-pollinated more radically than anytime before the internet was something more than a dialup connection for the Pentagon. The Sweetback Sisters don’t play quite a much live as they used to, so their album release show this Saturday night, August 19 at 8:30 PM at the Jalopy is likely to sell out. Cover is $20; get to Red Hook early if you can.

With its brisk shuffle rhythm and trainwhisttle guitar accents, Gotta Get A-Goin could be an early 50s Davis Sisters hit, right down to the vintage vernacular and Ben Sanders’ jaunty fiddle solo. The swinging I Got Lucky With You is just plain sweet: it’s got 50s-style PG-rated innuendo, and it’s also the rare love song that doesn’t suck:

Fortune smiles on very few in this world…
So I have to muddle through
The other things that I do
Since I got lucky with you

Trouble, by the band’s excellent former guitarist Jesse Milnes, is a sly, lowdown proto-rockabilly boogie with unexpectedly fiery cajun tinges, a tantalizingly brief duel between guitarists Ross Bellenoit and Ryan Hommel, and a trick ending. The album’s sad, swaying, aphoristic title track, a concert favorite, feels like an Ernest Tubb radio hit spiced up with a little Chuck Berry guitar. On one hand, the story of the redneck landlord/tenant confrontation in I’m Gonna Cry is just plain funny, but coming from a band more or less based in Brooklyn, that scenario takes on a more soberingly sinister level of meaning.

It’s All Your Fault is a showcase for the band, with solos all around from fiddle, to bass, to guitar, and finally a long, triumphant one from Brain Cloud clarinetist Dennis Lichtman. The wistful waltz One Day at a Time offers an intriguing new way of responding if your true love should unexpectedly pop the question. Keening pedal steel and gentle fiddle fuels the catchy, midtempo That’s All it Took; a duet that would be infinitely improved if just the band’s two frontwomen were singing it.

The cover of Marty Robbins’ Don’t Worry is the most surreal and musically amusing song on the album, an anachronistic mashup of hard honkytonk, early swamp rock and fuzztone 60s psychedelia. The album winds up with a lush, harmony-infused cover of George Jones’ classic honkytonk waltz If Drinkin’ Don’t Kill Me (Her Memory Will). It’s impossible to think of a better hard country record than this released this year.

Algiers’ Enigmatic New Album Looks at Current Day Perils Through a Glass, Darkly

Algiers are one of the world’s most individualistic, relevant bands. Their 2014 debut album was a grim, confrontational mashup of oldschool soul, new wave and postrock, with a fiery populist, anti-racist sensibility. Their latest release, The Underside of Power – streaming at Spotify – is more Sandinista than London Calling . It’s a jaggedly interconnected suits that owes as much to the 80s film scores of Brad Fiedel and RZA’s lavish 90s Wu-Tang Clan sample collages than it does to rock or soul music. Informed by the Black Lives Matter movement, hip-hop, oldschool gospel and Albert Camus, it demands repeated listenings. Like Joe Strummer, frontman Franklin James Fisher is a fiery vocalist but often obscured in the mix to the point where the repeat button is required. But it’s worth the effort. 

Fisher’s fervent gospel-influenced vocals rise over a trip-hop beat and Lee Tesche’s war videogame synth on the opaquely defiant opening track, Walk Like a Panther: Rev. Sekou meets Portishead. With its watery Siouxsie guitar, loopy backdrop and dark cinematic cloudbanks, Cry of the Martyrs gives Fisher a launching pad for fire-and-brimstone imagery with current-day resonance. The equally catchy title track, a hit in camo disguise, is dark Four Tops Motown through  prism of postrock: “t’s just a question of time before we fall fall down,” is the mantra.

Death Match blends Unknown Pleasures Joy Division with Depeche Mode darkwave, building an allusively apocalyptic scenario. With its toxic post-battle ambienceA Murmur a Sigh  echoes that gloom.

Ryan Mahan’s austerelly waltzing piano in Mme. Rieux – a reference to a minor character in Camus’ novel The Plague – adds Botanica plaintiveness to its towering Pink Floyd grandeur. A mashup of dark gospel and trip-hop, Cleveland is a fierce yet enigmatic anti-police violence anthem :

In Jackson Mississippi they don’t have to hide…
We’re coming back…
The hand that finds you behind and ties the the thirteen loops…

The question is who’s making the comeback here, the Klan, or the people? The answer is far from clear.

With its brisk motorik rhythm,  Animals is Wire crossed with the Bomb Squad  The band follows that with the slow, ominously atmospheric  instrumental Plague Years and then the broodingly crescendoing A Hymn For an Average Man, its horror movie piano loops setting the stage for mighty Floyd guitar crunch.

The echoey soundscape Bury Me Standing segues into the final cut, The Cycle the Spiral Time to Go Down Slowly, a pulsing noir soul song awash in sweeping war movie sonics. Spend some time with this album in the dark and then figure out where we’re going to go from here. 

The Colorful Dalton Deschain & the Traveling Show Make a Lower East Side Stop

Dalton Deschain & the Traveling Show are one of the most individualistic and artistically ambitious bands in New York. They’re very high-concept: their catchy, anthemic songs mirror and elaborate on characters and events in an ongoing retro-futurist serial novel that could go in plenty of directions, from graphic series to feature film. Over the past couple of years, Deschain (not his real name) and the band have been beating a path with their catchy, anthemic songs between Bed-Stuy and the Lower East Side when they’re not on tour. They’ve got a new ep, Catherine, streaming at Bandcamp and an accompanying novelette. They’re playing at Sidewalk on August 18 at 10:40 PM (tnat’s 10:40, not 10:30, folks), opening for perennially popular folk noir denizen Lorrane Leckie, who’s playing a rare, intimate solo show.

Deschain weaves a hell of a yarn. Set in 1945, the plotline traces a postwar America reeling from a biological attack and an Axis victory. Deschain builds suspense to the breaking point, doesn’t telegraph the action and keeps you on the page. As with all steampunk scenarios, verisimilitude sometimes takes a backseat to action, and when that gets all wiz-bang, a suspension of disbelief can be required. Loaded down and encumbered as she was, the heroine somehow gets away from the bad guys with guns? Really??? That’s where the story unravels away from Philip K. Dick toward Quentin Tarantino.

The songs on the ep are artsy and eclectic, and the band is first-rate, with Deschain handling all the guitars, David Warpaint on bass and Phil Harris on drums. Deschain sings through a tidal, uneasy vintage chorus-box effect as Tin Laurels gets underway, an enigmatic ingenue-in-the-big-city anthem. Interstitial (Approximate Man) alludes icily and mechanically to one of many stories nested within the narrative, in this case a mysterious, gnomic avant-garde poet who may hold the key to something not yet revealed. Approximate Girl concludes the ep: “if you think I’m beautiful then you never watched a star die,” the narrator asserts early on. Deschain’s long, tremolo-icepicked guitar solo at the end is irresistibly delicious. There’s a watery 80s feel to much of this music and this is a prime example: Peter Gabriel from late in the decade comes to mind, as well as late-period Bowie. It’ll be fun to see where the next episode picks up.

Sound Insights From Sascha Von Oertzen at Pioneer Works

Sascha Von Oertzen didn’t fall into sound engineering the way most of us did – DIY, in barewalled bodega basements or in studio apartments with a laptop and a SM58 mic. She found her calling in college in Berlin, before she met Lee Townsend, who introduced her to iconic jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, whose European tours she would eventually manage and mix live. That commitment and focus no doubt explains why Tim Berne saw something special in her and sponsored her for an American visa so she could mix at the Knitting Factory’s old SoHo location back in the late 90s. It was her first American job, straight out of college.

In an intimate, interactive discussion moderated by Lincoln Center visionary Meera Dugal at Pioneer Works last week, Von Oertzen traced a life in sound which includes some of the world’s most noteworthy recent achievements in the field, including engineering trumpeter Amir ElSaffar’s stunningly lavish, highly improvised large ensemble double album Not Two, and designing the sound at National Sawdust, Brooklyn’s best-sounding venue, from the ground up. It was there, she said dryly, that after almost twenty years in the business, she was finally given all the resources she needed to optimize the space sonically. The result is a system with speakers that aren’t fixed along the walls but suspended and telescoping downward from the ceiling, with a subwoofer in the center instead of the usual pair along the sides. “It has its own challenges,” she smiled.

As a teenager, she was a diehard Elvin Jones fan  and studied jazz drums, but found herself out of her league. In Germany in the 1980s, she explained, the audio engineering career track was taught from a classical music perspective – and was not welcoming to women. Still, she persevered – looking back, she said, she was grateful for getting such a rigorous background in both sound and learning firsthand about the stress of performance, even if that meant having to sit at the piano and scramble to play random parts of an orchestral score for a demanding professor. And much as she’s come to embrace the side of digital technology which is enabling to a dedicated engineer, it was clear that part of her misses the faders and dials of the analog technology through which she mastered her craft. With considerable relish, she recounted that the ElSaffar recording required her to practice the ancient and underappreciated art of splicing two-inch analog tape.

After touching on the challenges of mixing and tourmanaging for Lila Downs, a time on the road that Von Oertzen obviously enjoyed, many of her fellow engineers in the audience – all of them women – wanted to know what her favorite plugins are. But beyond favoring Protools over Logic, she wouldn’t go there, reminding everyone that she doesn’t even let the students in her NYU audio engineering classes touch plugins until they have a basic working knowledge of how to mix.

Others asked about of challenge of being a woman in a field dominated by men. Her message was clear: excel at what you do, stay on task, deflect uncool dude behavior and ask a lot of questions. Playing dumb to placate guys’ egos gets you nowhere, she asserted: knowledge is empowerment. While there’s a lot of work to be done to make the audio engineering world more hospitable for women – only ten to fifteen percent of her NYU classes are female, she said – we are making strides. One audience member mentioned the Bay Area-based Women’s Audio Mission society of audio engineers; New York could use an organization like that right about now. 

Fun fact: for anybody wondering why Bowery Poetry Club has such an excellent PA system, that venue was the first New York space to hire Von Oertzen for its sound design.

Nina Diaz Brings Her Relentless Angst and Catchy 80s-Influenced Tunesmithing to Wlliamsburg

Nina Diaz is best known as the frontwoman and guitarist of Girl in a Coma. Without knowing her background, you might swear that many of the songs on  her debut solo album The Beat Is Dead – streaming at Spotify – were relics from the 80s. Synthesizers pulse and swirl; the guitars and basslines are as dry as they are precise and catchy. Otherwise, the record sounds like a sleeker take on her main band, a series of angry anthems that would make a great soundtrack for a sequel to or remake of Fatal Attraction. You know – rain-slick streets, Soho lofts that you take the freight elevator up to since the real estate bubble hasn’t started to blow yet, and everybody’s wearing black eyeliner. 

Some of the songs here also recall Nicole Atkins, right down to the the brooding minor keys, slightly throaty vocals and noir tinges. Diaz’s next New York gig is at Rough Trade on August 17 at 9 for ten bucks in advance.

The album opens with Trick Candle, propelled by a dancing octave bass riff and spiraling synth, like Missing Persons without the metal buffoonery. With its darkly irresistible chorus, the album’s title track, more or less, is Queen Beats King.”All he seems to care about is fame… in the silence you create your own violence to turn and kill,” Diaz accuses.

Rebirth begins as syncopated cabaret-punk and then follows a trip-hop slink that eventually straightens out: “I will not love you until you are my enemy,” Diaz says perversely. With its doomed, angst-fueled major/minor changes, January 9th is a dead ringer for Atkins: “I don’t wanna be the bad one, I don;t wanna be the sad one that you find,” Diaz insists, althogh her voice can’t disguise that she knows what’s coming.

Fall in Love keeps that same wounded atmosphere going, awash in starry omnichord synth over a trip-hop groove: “Sometimes I speak too quickly, end up inside another shell…how would you know yourself, if you were never to fall in love…”

With Young Man, Diaz goes back to icy, stainless-countertopped new wave that explodes into Billy Idol bombast. She opens It with a tricky intro that artfully morphs into strutting, defiant ba-BUMP new wave noir cabaret. Then she hits a vengeful, sequencer-fueled motorik punk drive with Screaming Without a Sound. 

Its wryly blippy synth contrasting with big stadium rock guitars, Down continues the 80s vibe, this time going up into the attic for a Siouxsie-esque menace:: “I know all your secrets, I will push you to the ground, and you say, oh, why’d you kick me while I’m down?”, Diaz recounts.

She hits a creepy peak with Dig, its guitar chromatics fueling a lurid tale of abandonment and lust, and follows that with Star, a titanic, blue-flame 6/8 anthem, a counterpart to Atkins’ signature song The Tower.

Stark, starlit guitar builds a moody noir ranchera backdrop behind Diaz’s melancholy vocals in For You, a sad waltz. The album winds up with Mortician Musician, a bitter soul anthem recast as Orbison noir: “I’m not a fool for writing melodies, I’m just a fool for trying to make you see what I see,, ask me what kind of coffin I’d like, it’s the one you picked out for me,” Diaz rails..Dudes, get your skinny tie on; girls, feather your hair and take the subway to Bedford Avenue on the 17th because there was no Uber back when it sounds like this unselfconsciously brilliant album was made.

Dalava Hauntingly Reinvent Grim, Timelessly Relevant Slovak and Czech Folk Songs

Dalava reinvent dark, often grim, centuries-old Slovak and Czech folk tunes as intense, dynamically shifting psychedelic rock. Guitarist Aram Bajakian is arguably the greatest lead player ever to pass through Lou Reed’s band: only the late Robert Quine and Mick Ronson compare. Bajakian also plays with numerous other outfits including lavish Hungarian folk/art-rock band the Glass House Ensemble.

His wife, singer Julia Ulehla, is the scion of an important Moravian musicological legacy. Her great-grandfather Vladimir, a colleague of Leos Janacek, was a major player in that discipline and as she tells it, a pretty amazing guy. His exhaustive fieldwork and research would make a good movie all by themselves. You can read a lot more about that in the extensive liner notes to the latest album The Book of Transfigurations, streaming at Bandcamp.

Bajakian isn’t coming through town this month to play this amazing, haunting music, but he will be at the Stone on both August 19 and 20 at 8:30 PM with John Zorn’s quasi-horror-surf band, Abraxas; cover is $20.

Like the duo’s 2015 debut album, this latest one radically reimagines a series of picturesque tunes from the family collection.Its central theme is change: as Ulehla puts it, “Girl into speckled bird, girl into married woman, boy into soldier, girl into mother, mother into widow, boy into ghost, vibrantly strong soldier into wounded corpse, and man into murderer.”

The album is bookended by mid-century field recordings of her grandfather Jiri singing with spare cimbalom accompaniment by Antoš Frolka. The senior Ulehla’s voice is raw, strong and impassioned as he sings of departure and no return: a soldier off to war, possibly. The band – Bajakian on guitar, Peggy Lee on cello, Tyson Naylor on multi-keys, Colin Cowan on bass and Dylan van der Schyff on drums – then make relentlessly prowling Velvets rock out of it.

The album’s second song, Grass, offers delicate, airy contrast, a vignette that captures the literally crushing poverty faced by peasants across Europe for thousands of years. Bajakian plays jagged minor-key slashes over a careening, bolero-ish beat behind Ulehla’s accusatory wail in The Rocks Began to Crumble, a soldier sent off to war bitterly telling his true love that she might as well marry somebody else.

Lee’s cello builds distantly claustrophobic ambience in Iron Bars, Iron Lock, illustrating an age-old mother-daughter conflict: mom wants to keep her kid away from the guys. The Bloody Wall allusively recounts a murder victim haunting the scene of the crime over lushly crescendoing, anthemic art-rock. It’s one of the album’s most gorgeous melodies, the strings matching the intricate Czech ornamentation of Ulehla’s voice.

That narrative is echoed with a more spare, atmospherically crescendoing approach in You Used to Look Like a Lion, a gruesome lament for a dying soldier. Then the band laps into Red Violet, a stormy, syncopated 1-chord jam in 7/8 time. Bajakian and Ulehla slip back into the shadows for Souling, a love song set to an uneasy fingerpicked acoustic backdrop.

The album’s starkest, most riveting song is War, Ulehla’s wounded melismas soaring over Bajakian’s sparse, lingering minor-key broken chords and Lee’s washes of cello: it’s another vivid soldier-going-off-to-war scenario. Then Lee and Ulehla flicker through the anguished medieval magic realism of Mother Gave Away Her Daughter,

He’s Bringing Something For Me, a veiled account of love and abandonment, has an even more sepulchral atmosphere that winds out with an ominous rumble. The terse murder ballad Carnival is awash in creepy wind-chime ripples and Ulehla’s phantasmic vocals. The album’s closing cut, Sell Us Your Shirt mashes up the vocals of grandfather and granddaughter Ulehla over the cimbalom, a cruel encounter with thieves who’ll literally steal the shirt off an unlucky peasant’s back. How little things have changed over the centuries: this magical, mysterious, imagistic album will entrance anybody who likes dark, brooding music: you don’t have to speak Czech to appreciate it, although that helps.

The Auspicious Future and Gloriously Melancholy Past of Americana Rock at Lincoln Center

For the last several years, the Americana Music Association has partnered to book the closing night of Lincoln Center Out of Doors. Yesterday’s festivities began with multi-instrumentalist Amanda Shires and her similarly brilliant band and closed soaringly and bittersweetly with the unselfconsciously gorgeous harmonies of the Jayhawks. There were other acts scheduled throughout the day, some of them rambunctious, one of them absolutely putrid, but if these two are the foundation and future of Americana, New York’s default listening music is in good hands.

Shires doesn’t exactly play violin like your typical Americana fiddler. From song to song, she’d fire off savage Romany chromatics, venomous tarantella riffs and stark blues along with plenty of extended technique, from muted pizzicato harmonics to slow, eerily surfacing glissandos. She’s also a hell of a storyteller, chooses her words and sings every song differently, in character. A brittle ingenue, wounded valkyrie and wistful red-dirt Texas songbird were just three of them.

She has a hell of a band. Her lead guitarist wove his way from biting minor-key blues, through menacingly Lynchian twang, often sparring with the bandleader. The bassist played what would have been new wave if the drummer hadn’t swung the music so hard: all those steady eighth notes and the occasional emphatic chord on the low end gave the music extra majesty.

They opened with My Love (The Storm), more or less a remake of Wayfaring Stranger, and brought the show full circle at the end, taking out Look Like a Bird with the day’s most searing guitar/violin duel. After a noir bolero and an amped-up romp through the sharp, bitter The Way It Dimmed, Shires told a funny story about an encounter with a Florida fan aromatic with “an herb that is legal in Colorado and other kind states.” He gave her a bag that turned out not to be filled with the obvious but with bits and pieces of a dead Siberian tiger – or so he said. “It’ll make you bulletproof!” he explained.

With that, Shires lit into  the song he inspired, which was funny for an instant but got dark quickly, a catalog of what might be worth protecting from gunfire, personal to political. A spare, lingering take of  Harmless, a cheating song that underscored dashed hopes rather than the potential fallout, contrasted with a loud, enigmatic rocker that brought to mind the Throwing Muses, then a loping, simmering Tex-Mex ballad that slowly crescendoed into growling psychedelia.

The Jayhawks have held up stunningly well since their glory days in the late 90s and early zeros. Frontman Gary Louris, pianist/organist Karen Grotberg and drummer Tim O’Reagan still blend voices for the most glistening harmonies this side of the Balkans, and bassist Marc Perlman still makes his slinky, seamlessly melodic lines look effortless. Meanwhile, the band’s newsboy-capped latest addition filled out the sound, switching between mandolin, airy violin lines, acoustic guitar and Telecaster.

In the years since the band’s legendary turn-of-the-century triptych of albums – 1997’s Sound of Lies, 2000’s Smile and 2003’s Rainy Day Music – Louris has grown into the lead guitar god he was struggling to be then. He’s switched out most of the screeching, Stoogoid dry-ice attack for a precise, meticulously dynamic, texturally rich volleys that varied from Mick Ronson heavy blues, to many subtle shades of clang and twang, enabled by fast footwork on a pedalboard. His signature sound – a little Beatles, a little Bowie and a whole lot of Big Star – has held up as well as the band.

They opened with the mighty, indomitable powerpop anthem I’m Gonna Make You Love Me and followed with an appropriately towering version of the evening’s best song, the angst-fueled individualist anthem The Man Who Loved Life and its bitter on-the-road narrative.

Trouble, the centerpiece of Sound of Lies’ thread of rejection and alienation, was as shattering as the album version, Louris hitting his flange for extra surrealism to raise the effect of being “Hung out to dry, backs against the wall, stoned out of our minds.”

The rest of the show followed a dynamic arc up to a big crescendo with Tailspin, its gloomy perspective muted within the framework of a mighty singalong anthem. O’Reagan took over lead vocals on the moody, C&W-fueled ballad Tampa to Tulsa. The material from the band’s latest album Paging Mr. Proust was surprisingly strong, including a vampy, vintage soul-inspired number that could have been the Zombies. Even the slighter, poppier material – like Angelyne and Save It For a Rainy Day – was fresh and forceful. How many other bands who’ve been around since the 80s still channel this much passion and intensity?

Lincoln Center Out of Doors wraps up tonight, August 13 at 6 PM out back in Damrosch Park with oldschool 70s soul man Don Bryant and then veteran blues guitarist Bonnie Raitt, And the atrium space just north of 62nd Street continues to program some of the most exhilaratingly diverse acts from around the globe. Next up there: a rare twinbill of hypnotic, otherworldly, intense Colombian bullerengue with singer and tambolero Emilsen Pacheco Blanco along with singer Carolina Oliveros’ mighty 13-piece vocal/percussion choir Bulla en el Barrio on August 24 at 7:30 PM. The show is free; the earlier you get there, the better.

Lavish, Paradigm-Shifting Indian Choral Sounds from the Navatman Music Collective

Like the Brooklyn Raga Massive, the Navatman Music Collective are a semi-rotating cast of some of New York’s most innovative Indian instrumental and vocal talent. Just the fact that they’re the only carnatic choir in this hemisphere attests to the group’s adventurousness. Bands have been making rock music out of ancient carnatic themes since the days of the Beatles and Grateful Dead, and then there’s Bollywood, but Indian classical ensembles typically have no use for harmony because it doesn’t exist in the tradition.

When the Navatman Music Collective harmonize, their sound is lush, and otherworldly, and unlike any other choir in the world. Other times, they’ll all sing a single melody line in unison, or with the men and women at each end of an octave. The group are playing the final day of their enticingly eclectic Drive East Festival of Indian music and dance at 2 PM on August 26 at Dixon Place; $20 tix are available along with numerous multiple-show deals and full-festival passes.

The group’s debut album, An Untimely Joy is streaming at youtube. They open strikingly with An Ode in Eight Verses, a stately processional set to an uneasily melismatic, Arabic-tinged mode over an oscillating drone and mysterious bell accents.

The second track, Offering (an excerpt from raga Gavati) features percussionist Rajna Swaminathan and violinist Anjna Swaminathan, cantering along on a tricky but elegantly boomy rhythm: the interweave of voices is rapturously kaleidoscopic.  The movie theme Sweet Infatuation showcases the ensemble’s core mens’ and womens’ voices, bandleader Roopa Mahadevan alongside Kamini Dandapani, Vignesh Ravichandran, Janani Kannan, Preetha Raghu, Kalpana Gopalakrishnan, Shraddha Balasubramaniam and Shiv Subramaniam. They bolster a balmy, conversational duet between Subramanian and Mahadevan over airy violin and bubbly flute.

The ensemble sing the album’s most epic. majestically kinetic, unpredictably serpentine piece, Summer Love in unison, answered by dancing flute and violin in places. A Blue Note puts the strings of similarly innovative Indian trio Karavika front and center in an acerbically chromatic, moodily enveloping piece, the swooping, melismatic violin of Trina Basu anchored by Amali Premawardhana’s stark cello and Perry Wortman’s bass, taken upward by the choir’s resolute intensity. The album winds up with the playful Urban Gamak, Mahadevan and Subramaniam trading shivery microtonal riiffs over a steady, swaying backdrop.

Fans of Indian music will hear things they never heard before on this magical, energetic album; those whose taste in choral music gravitates toward adventurous composers like Arvo Part or Caroline Shaw should also check it out. And the group are amazing live.

Acoustic Guitarslinger R.D. King Brings His Richly Intertwining, Melodic Instrumentals to NYC

First there was B.B. Then there was Albert, then Freddie. And now there’s R.D., the latest in a line of first-class guitar-playing Kings. Difference is that R.D. King plays acoustic, and that his style is not blues but his own intricate, meticulous instrumental material that could be called pastoral psychedelia or cinematic folk. Either way, it’s a hell of a lot more energetic and epic than most music for the acoustic guitar.

King is bound to get comparisons to a whole slew of fingerstyle players who use unorthodox or open tunings – John Renbourn, Bert Jansch, Adrian Legg, Leo Kottke and John Fahey are all in the mix – but if there’s any current-day artist he brings to mind, it’s David Grubbs, who’s more of a Strat guy. This particular King’s album RD King vs. Self  is streaming at Soundcloud, and for anybody who wants to see his fingers fly up and down the fretboard, he’s playing the small room at the Rockwood on August 19 at 6 PM. Then the following night he’s at Pine Box Rock Shop at 9:30.

His technique is spectacular, employing all kinds of harmonics, hammer-ons, pull-offs, flurrying upper-register clusters and contrastingly terse, precise basslines – and as many notes as this guy plays, he doesn’t waste them. The album’s first track is Lightness of Being, set to a rapidfire triplet rhythm. With its web of overdubs and subtly shifting center, it’s as if Fahey and Renbourn conspired to write their own Twin Peaks theme, but closer to waterfalling folk than noir cinematics. The Precipice is a stormy blend of flamenco and a 60s hotrod theme, while the pensive, propulsively waltzing, attractively summery title track hints at acoustic Pink Floyd, 60s American folk and Scottish highland balladry.

Heartstring, a gorgeously wistful song without words, brings to mind what Richard Thompson could do turbocharging a sad Jimmy Webb ballad. There Are No Young Forests comes across as a verdant, enigmatic counterpart to Grubbs’ vast electric deep-space tableaux. The uneasy Vertigo continues on a long, subtly crescendoing tangent, sparkling with harmonics, followed by the tight, emphatic variations of Luminescence.

The album winds up with the tidally shifting vamps of Twilight, rising to a bristling peak, and then the sparkly, cascading An End to Wandering. If you play guitar and feel stuck in a rut, listening to this guy will get you unstuck in a hurry.