Speck Mountain + Sharon Van Etten

Thursday, July 16
Admission: $5, $10 minimum
Showtime: 8pm
reservations are recommended

Speck Mountain are an ambient-soul band possessed as much by the grit of southern soul as the spell of infinite drones. Co-leaders Karl Briedrick and Marie-Claire Balabanian provoke each other with intuitive, womb-curled melody, exploded texture, and spiky, strutting rhythm—and so far I’m just talking about the guitars. Marie-Claire also keeps a full-sized Aretha loaded in her throat like some kind of ungodly spring reverb, but has the sense to only let her uncoil just enough, never overdoing it. Karl and Marie-Claire fill out the songs with lyrics in thrall to the mysteries of compulsion, and the ache and rapture of giving in.

Signed to Carrot Top Records, Karl and Marie-Claire continue to run the Burnt Brown Sounds label out of Chicago.

www.myspace.com/speckmountainhttp://www.reverbnation.com/c./rpk/12730?access_code=3183e0d088903e893df8

Sharon Van Etten has a soft, strong soprano that trembles with slight vibrato in the long sustained notes. High, angelic, disembodied, without audible strain or breath, she traces out melodies, yet just when the tone seems too pure, she slips into the smallest earthy slides, the slightest Appalachian catches and yodels, an angel trying out the blues. You could imagine her as one of the 1960s’ long-lost flower children – more grounded than Vashti Bunyan, less overtly jazzy than Linda Perhacs, but in the same family. Still there’s a touch of modernity, of self-direction and self-reliance in her work that places her firmly in the here and now. - Dusted Magazine