LOWER DENS play Lee’s Palace on Tuesday (July 17) with No Joy. See listing. Rating: NNNN
Androgynous-voiced singer/songwriter Jana Hunter has spent her fair share of time in the freak folk circles that sprang up around Devendra Banhart in the early aughts. She can be heard on albums by CocoRosie, Phosphorescent, Castanets and Indian Jewelry, to name just a handful.
It’s the Baltimore musician’s voice – sometimes ethereal, sometimes husky, usually intoning long-held Thom Yorke-esque notes from her diaphragm – that breathes life into her most recent project, Lower Dens. The four-piece reveals no hint of Hunter’s folk past, but just embraces all the weirder parts: drone, ambience, experimentalism.
The sophomore album’s 10 songs, said to be inspired by Kraftwerk and Brian Eno, are minor-key and unsettling, growing with guitar swirl and synthscapes before trimming down to basic, motorik rhythms. A few, like Lion In Winter Pt. 1 and 12-minute closer In The Beginning Is The End, test your patience, while others, like Nova Anthem and Lamb, become so surprisingly transcendent that they vanquish any and all tedium.
Top track: Lamb