Here’s Laura Gibson, the latest (if not greatest) of the Portland Lauras to capture my attention with a type of folk music that offers Oregon as one of America’s last uncharted places. Consider the unknowability that Rod Rondeaux walks off into at the end of Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff, and imagine Meek’s modern descendents still living there, but taking a certain solace in what can’t be seen. So, Gibson is younger and maybe a bit less assured than another of these descendents, Laura Veirs, and still working toward the clarity that made the songs on Veirs’ seventh album, 2010’s July Flame, sound like they’d been plucked out of the air. When Gibson tried to write a lullaby for her niece a few years ago, she confessed at Low Spirits on Thursday night, she ended up with a lullaby for anxious adults about looming death; I doubt Veirs would suffer a similar loss of purpose. But, the songs on July Flame could be said to have been derived from the omniscience and orderliness that maybe only impending motherhood can inspire, so let’s not belabor the point. Gibson is her own woman and practices a captivating and well-crafted untidiness on songs from her new third album La Grande. Her set at Low Spirits began with La Grande’s unsettled, rattling title track, a gather-round anthem that showed us a band battered by unseen forces, the drummer channeling an ongoing drama with stray thwacks, à la Bill Callahan’s recent “Drover.”
Later songs calmed the storm only to stir it up again, and by the time of set-ending “The Fire,” with its painfully shrill honky tonk keys, Gibson and her band, dubbed The Cyclops on this current tour, had transformed into a rock ‘n’ roll quartet in full control of the noise they created. But, in general, Gibson’s music, bolstered by The Cyclops, rides on waves of quietest noise and favors sounds that softly bleed: The drummer leans on his crash and ride, the keys and acoustic guitar are played near the threshold of subtle distortion, flute and muffled vocals rustle and crackle. After “Skin, Warming Skin,” Gibson mentioned having originally recorded the song with the same microphone Michael Jackson used on “Thriller,” and while that fact doesn’t really speak any interesting convergence with Jackson’s music, her decision to employ in concert a second microphone that lightly obscures her voice does speak an important aesthetic choice, one that subordinates her beautiful voice to her surroundings.
For Gibson has a very pleasing voice, full and unblemished, with a bit of an affected twang at times, but it never struck me as the star of the show, at least not live. If one is tracking the drama of these songs, the best place to listen is in the subtle collisions of guitar, drums, keys, and the ensuing peaks of volume and intensity. But Gibson’s voice does allow for some interesting Joanna Newsom-esque phrasings; when it aims too high she chokes off her syllables, breaking words at their center and then sliding back down soulfully. During the encore, she gathered the audience together for a sing-along to “The Rushing Dark,” and because her ambitions seem to be more musical than vocal, because she comes from a place of pure, unselfconscious singingness, the communion proved more than usually meaningful.
She played a surprisingly short set, no more than an hour altogether (but a good band, if they’re not charging too much, can play whatever length they’re comfortable with, right?), made up mostly of songs from La Grande. She introduced “The Longest Day,” from her 2006 debut, as one of her earliest songs, and it was an interesting glimpse into the development of a songwriter. She began here, a spare acoustic love song, and to this has added all the more crackling elements.
Opening act Breathe Owl Breathe, from Michigan, suggest a number of strange comparisons (Young Marble Giants for the storybook set? The Magnetic Fields at their most fantastical, at those times when the narrative is as much in the music as in the words?), but what it ultimately amounts to is the kind of quietly celebratory music that can sound quaint when it describes day but infinite when it describes night. And Breathe Owl Breathe, at least during the opening song that set the tone for their set, struck me as creatures of the night. Singer Micah Middaugh has a deep, preoccupied voice that recalls David Berman or Bill Callahan, and he’s as serious as those men but directs his mind toward subjects that could cruelly be called whimsical; one song describes loss of human self-will as being the result of an invisible tiger taking us by the scruff of the neck and pulling us through our lives. He seemed certain of the explanation, and I was reminded of the way that the weird space of music and performance forgives, even applauds, the eccentricities that might make Middaugh unaccountably strange in any other context.
I’ve rarely seen a band go so deep into songs of such fragile gravity, enacting stories and ideas with music but never letting it become dumbly theatrical, using their voices to imitate theremin (impressively!), winds, breezes, oceans (by singing inside a glass of water), but whatever images these sounds conjured always subordinate to their integrity as music. And through all this, drummer Trevor Hobbes provides a surprising but quite welcome rhythmic dynamism, holding the breezes together with the steady beat of his floor tom before branching off into more elaborate patterns. The band is quite well versed in drums, necessarily so. Cellist and singer Andrea Moreno-Beals, too, borrowed the tom for one song and proved an equally talented, and athletic, drummer. Such firm grounding allows all the other sounds their straying imperfection, and something tells me the music wouldn’t be nearly so pleasurable with all its elements locked into place. Bands like this should be allowed to record their albums live.
