event
Alela Diane
Also Playing: Marissa Nadler
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Megan Holmes
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Tue Nov 3
8:30 pm,
Alela Diane and Marissa Nadler at Cactus CaféCactus Café 2247 Guadalupe St, Austin, TX
Northern California singer-songwriter Alela Diane played her first show opening for friend Joanna Newsom, and 2006’s The Pirate’s Gospel should have borne a sticker saying, “Recommended if you like Joanna Newsom and Jolie Holland.” While that record found Diane building subdued, reflective songs around her voice, guitar-picking, and little else, her Rough Trade debut, To Be Still, brings in pedal steel, cello, and violin for an expanded sonic palette that nevertheless manages to sound arrestingly stark. She co-headlines here with the far more melancholy Marissa Nadler, whose recent Little Hells digs beneath her somber, crackling-with-electricity folk to find something leagues more spectral, with ghostly reverb and keyboard washes creating pitch-black depths of tactile gloom.
Northern California singer-songwriter Alela Diane played her first show opening for friend Joanna Newsom, and 2006’s The Pirate’s Gospel should have borne a sticker saying, “Recommended if you like Joanna Newsom and Jolie Holland.” While that record found Diane building subdued, reflective songs around her voice, guitar-picking, and little else, her Rough Trade debut, To Be Still, brings in pedal steel, cello, and violin for an expanded sonic palette that nevertheless manages to sound arrestingly stark. She co-headlines here with the far more melancholy Marissa Nadler, whose recent Little Hells digs beneath her somber, crackling-with-electricity folk to find something leagues more spectral, with ghostly reverb and keyboard washes creating pitch-black depths of tactile gloom.
Updated 11/16/2009
