Plume Giant

I had no idea who these people were before I walked in the door of the show our band was opening. Such a fucking gift.  Plume Giant.

They are a trio in the truest sense of the word. Every song is testing the range of skills each of them have, and what they can switch between. The interest of the music comes not just from their individual talents, but in the sense of flexibility and range of expression that each of them have. Maybe that feeling comes from their control and technique, but there's also something in light and crisp folk music that lends itself well to the ear: there are so few performers, so many instrumental breaks, and such different instrumentation that nothing could be muddy. Their level of technique is such that it needn't even be commented on; it was such that the quickness of their minds, of their powerful arrangements and inventions, and of the often rambling non-repetitive structure of their music, that shone through their technique like a prism. It was like watching 3 similarly-trilingual people speaking three different languages and understanding each other perfectly. The vocalist/violinist/organist/tambouriner, the guitarist/main-vocalist, and the violist/guitarist/vocalist.

There's a lovely kind of quick-wittedness to their music. They rely on the virtuosity of their performance, the switching between instruments, and their beautifully executed 3-part harmonies to draw the listener in. It's brilliant; it's also showy magic that allows a more relaxed approach to structuring songs. Sometimes that worked brilliantly, but other times the pieces sagged under their own weight. A classically-trained jazz-aware approach to simple folk progressions and storytelling can mean pretty gestures, or it can mean deeply meaningful links of pretty gestures, and I got both. It made me realize how much my music and the bands I play in rely on ostinati and a certain set "sound" for a piece in order to function. There's a bravery in evolution, something I hear in some of Joanna Newsom's best scores as well. Pop is more about the unification of texture, maybe, whereas folk is more about using often-limited resources (voice+guitar, small acoustic ensemble) to create however much variation on a message that's necessary/worthwhile. And this was all invention on strong cores and it was all, all, all great.