The North Country
Songbyrd, Feb. 24, 2023
The North Country was the first band saw in the early days of vaccine availability after the darkest days of the pandemic. It wasn’t because I love the band that much, as because I knew them, they were local, and I liked the guys, and I wanted to get out to see the music in a lower stakes venue like DC9 before venturing into a large crowded club.
At that point, The North Country had a long and relatively distinguished local career. Initially kind of a folk-influenced indie band, their 2020 album
America and Afterwards showcased a brighter sound with female vocals backing up Andrew Grossman and an engaging sound that covered the gamut from folk to indie to synthpop from their new band members in an expanding lineup. Some of the material on that record was among my favorite music of the year by a DC-based outfit, like “Future Humans” and the Springsteen-meets-Erasure “Chairs of Love (On Prisoners of War).”
That record is still the band’s most recent full length, but in 2022 they released a pandemic project,
Born At the Right Time, that had been assembled in the exquisite corpse approach pioneered by the surrealists of 1930s Paris. Each member contributed parts separately during the COVID quarantine, and they were cobbled together after the fact in an assembly line process.
Born At the Right Time is a 19-minute, six-song EP on Misra Records, and while it’s not as immediately welcoming a record as
America and Afterwards, it reveals the band’s comfort with more experimental directions.
At Songbyrd in late February, the band spotlighted
Born At the Right Time along with
America and Afterwards and their earlier material. What emerges in
Born At the Right Time is that the band showed its ability — either by inclination or purely by circumstance — to move more to the abstracted pop direction of early 2010s Dirty Projectors, or perhaps their DC neighbors The Beauty Pill, in sound.
“Procrastinator”, an all-lockdown video, captures the off-balance feel of the pandemic and the damage of social media as a stresser and distractor.
Alongside Andrew Grossman, the two female vocalists, Laurel Halsey and Margot MacDonald contribute most significantly, offering a Day-Glo B-52s giddiness to the off-kilter pop on songs like the delightful title track “Born At the Right Time” (not a Paul Simon cover), which is like Vampire Weekend-inspired guitar pop with West African guitar influences, but darker in tone and fracturing into chaos over time, as if the component parts could no longer cohere.
Grossman has become a stronger frontman as The North Country expanded its lineup and its sonic palette. (I saw him years and years ago, and he seemed almost embarrassed to front a band.) Now, he happily jokes and leads the band on vocals and guitars but is equally comfortable ceding the spotlight to McDonald and Halsey on many numbers, and bassist Austin Blanton sang lead on one track. This was the last show of their brief early-spring tour in the Mid-Atlantic and East Coast, and a homecoming gig in DC, so they seemed both relaxed and happy to engage with the crowd, which included a number of DC personalities in the music space like Séan Barna (who drummed on one song with the band), Philip Basnight from Broke Royals, and others.
The opener was
You and Me and You, rendered sometimes as YouxMexYou which honestly isn’t that much shorter. The well-attired, sweetly harmonizing group had two female lead singers (presumably, the two Yous), and one male lead (the Me). In the three or four songs I saw, the ensemble played on classic country tropes and song styles with a winking modern sensibility and a lot of good humor. I would ordinarily link to their Bandcamp or a video, but they don’t have anything released yet and I believe nothing is scheduled to come out until the spring.
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 03/04/2023 04:41PM by zwirnm.
