Monday March 22, the Swells opening
This Monday marks the anticipated return to Lexington of West-coaster’s Port O’Brien, who will play Cosmic Charlies on a double bill with the Swells.
Port O’Brien splits time between Cambria, California, a small fishing town on the coast, and Kodiak, Alaska, where founding members Van Pierszalowski and Cambria Goodwin spend time working seasonal jobs on a fishing boat (Pierszalowski) and at an on-shore bakery (Goodwin). Currently, the band is on a month-long tour, ending in late March, throughout the eastern half of the United States; from there, they will embark on a European tour for the month of April and a bit of May.
Port O’Brien generally comes out of the new folk scenes that have sprung up throughout the west coast (with seeming headquarters in LA, Portland and Seattle). Their first album, All We Could Do Was Sing, sounds about what you might expect an album to sound like that first germinated in the relative separation of Alaskan commercial fishing boats and on-shore bakeries, and later later came to fruition in the context of communal playing: joyous, acoustic-based and filled with the social and physical energy of a near-sprouted seed just waiting for spring to pop it into the world.
While songs like “Waiting on a Boat” and “Fisherman’s Son” betray a pent-up desire for sociability and a yearning to get planted back on shore, the general vibe of Sing is nevertheless joyous. Though some of the songs lyrics may be wistful and lonely, once played on-shore in the relative warmth of a home, in twos and in threes, with guitars and banjos and percussion, they could only become something else to the band: joyous sing-alongs with friends and lovers.
The more recent record, 2009’s Threadbare, often eschews that raw acoustic instrumentation for a more produced—ultimately, full—sound. The sing-alongs are still there in Threadbare, and so, too, is the band’s proclivity for building crashing crescendos from the spare, near-silences out of many of their song’s beginnings. But in the new album, the vocals emerge more fully as yet another instrument in the lush Port O’Brien sound.
When they trend toward the more folkie, the band’s flush of harmonies sounds at home on a Fleet Foxes album; when they hit a little darker and weirder, as in the opening track “High Without the Hope 3” and “Tree Bones,” it reminds me of a different, non-Fleet Foxes, musical line of lush pop harmony sound: those wonderful 3-minute set pieces of the Olivia Tremor Control.
On the undercard for the evening, Lexington’s own joyous musicians, the Swells, will kick things off. Though the band is often connected to the south coast with its New Orleans brass band riffs, trump and sax/clarinet players Warren Byrom and Chris Sullivan both spent time working the fishing boats in the northwest coasts of Alaska, which is how they first heard of Port O’Brien. Sullivan’s been looking forward to this show for a month now, which means good things—so come on to Cosmic Charlie’s this Monday and take the whole thing in.
Here’s a link to Port O’Brien’s “Stuck on a Boat”:
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