Music Review: Indie Round-Up - Lights, Heavies, Seymour, Spanic Boys, Cunniff

We're all over the place this week, musically speaking. So to avoid getting us all dizzy with mood swings, I've put these selections in order starting with the darkest and progressing to the most upbeat. It works out nicely, because if you only have time to read one of this week's reviews, let it be that of...

The National Lights, The Dead Will Walk, Dear

Looking at the song titles on the debut CD from this Virginia trio - like a song called "O, Ohio," and the traditional "The Water Is Wide" - I expected folk music.

But no. It wasn't the old "The Water Is Wide" that everyone in the world seems to have covered. And, although the CD has a hushed, subdued sound, plenty of acoustic guitar, and no drums, it's not folk music.

Then again, maybe it is. Certainly in the "it's all folk music" sense. Or if you look at the whole ten-song, 28-minute opus as one long American Gothic murder ballad. Because every song is about hurting and dying. Beautiful women or children are killed with shotguns, or drowned - one way or another enholed. Often there's water. Sometimes the singer is alone, sometimes not. Sometimes he sees the victim as deserving of her fate:

We'll wait 'til dark to dig that hole outside
Big enough for you to fit inside
All those hearts you broke are still beating
This is helping, honey this is healing

Other times she seems innocent:

There's a hole in the river
Where they put your body down...
I'll hold in my bones
That sweet little heart of yours
It's not big enough to beat for two anymore
I'll grow for us both

The creepy thing is the way these doomy lyrics are set, not to death-metal grinding sounds, but quite the opposite - in gently rolling little songs, miniatures really, sung in grey, half-whispered tones by songwriter/mastermind Jacob Thomas Berns. Shades of Sufjan Stevens, ghosts of Nick Cave.

Berns's sparse guitars are padded by multi-instrumentalist Ernest Christian Kiehne, Jr. (Ernest Christian, get it? Oh wait, that's his real name...), who adds more guitars, some bass, and lots of keyboards, including weighty organ parts on several songs. And the icing on this devil's food cake: smooth, eerie harmony vocals by Sonya Cotton. Descended, I imagine, from Cotton Mather.

There's no need to mention which songs have what, though. This CD plays as a single sad, strangely pretty, discreetly paranoid, glittery-eyed work. Of which you can get a good taste at their Myspace page. Go. But watch your back. For "look at what we've become/A black heart and a loaded gun."

Article Author: Jon Sobel

Jon Sobel is Blogcritics' Culture and Theater Editor. In addition to reviewing NYC theater, he writes a semi-regular round-up of independent music releases. By day he is a computer professional and a freelance writer and editor, and at night he's a …

Visit Jon Sobel's author page — Jon Sobel's Blog