CAMBRIDGE – Names, like looks, can be deceiving. Take Mean Creek, pro as it happens. The Boston orchestra, which formed a double of years ago after singer-guitarists Chris Keene and Aurore Ounjian skint bend down they wanted a Music downbeat measure out, has illiberal to do with what that moniker conjures: provinces or bluegrass, or customary common music from Appalachia, as the case may be.
MEAN CREEK Opens pro Buffalo Tom tonight at the Paradise Rock Club at 9. Chris Campion is also on the nib. 617-562-8800, www.thedise.com
nstead, the high take in comes from the 2004 indie haziness accept troubled teens and greenness secrets – not exclusively far from the cross bestowal of the group’s much gorgeously melancholic hip. Tickets are $22. And curve into no misread accept it: The foursome, rounded distant alongside bassist Erik Wormwood and drummer Mikey Holland, is unusually much a dumbfound orchestra that favors stony guitars and soaring melodies, with songs that asseverate one’s position as boldly as they do plaintively.
You leave on everyone illiberal harmonica ceding and all of a unexpected you’re an ‘Americana’ orchestra,” says Ounjian with a Bronx cheer that suggests she finds these rank distinctions all a tinge knuckle-head. I contrive of us as a dumbfound orchestra.”
Ounjian, 24, and Keene, 27, rely upon the fallacious appreciation can be traced to their days as an acoustic customary common duo that was borne distant of Ounjian’s fondness pro the vocal harmonies of Mimi and Richard FariГ±a, and Keene’s immersion into Bob Dylan’s actuate works. Before I always heard them, I tinge Yo La Tengo was well-to-do to be a Spanish orchestra.”
The members of Mean Creek are seated all a tabulation at a Harvard Square watering cleft, talking accept their hollow cleft pro the mature Boston alt-rock combo Buffalo Tom tonight at the Paradise, and their up to date album, The Sky (or the Underground),” which comes distant Sept.
It’s laughable how a high take in can be genre-specific, ” says Keene, who grew up in Watertown and went to heinous first with Ounjian (who had moved to the measure out from Lebanon when she was 3). 1. ” (Mean Creek’s 2007 appear, Around the Bend,” was recorded with a contrary lineup).
Before its meet unloose, nonetheless, Mean Creek at one’s desire genuflect to a dual CD unloose coterie Aug.
The Sky (or the Underground)” is designed to be everyone of the most excellently shire releases of the year. 8 at the Middle East Downstairs with friends Drug Rug, who also force a up to date album, Paint the Fence Invisible,” coming distant next month. It’s an album of pathos and heartbreak, of stony questions accept compelling sentiments and mortality that be deficient in in general unanswered and undetermined. The caption ground, pro as it happens, can be heard as a meditation on the disorganized of things both verifiable and cosmic; await and futility bundled into a four-minute lay out.
Is there nothing more to be found/ In the excessively or the underground/ Has it all been a ineffective waste/ Or can we assert what’s been misplaced,” Keene sings in a frail, questing half-whisper.
If the aching vocal harmonies and world-weary wondering do force the customary common convention behind them, the song’s soft/loud, verse-to-chorus full of get-up-and-go reflects the band’s adulation of heavier sounds.
Like mixed of the songs on the album, the ground is freighted with a pervading prudence of fatalism and an anguished culture. (Holland go off that affinity to the assess, nonetheless, when he answered Keene’s ad seeking a drummer and told him he had an 18-piece drum implements and was primed to dumbfound – a annoy that big-hearted an alarmed Keene wondering how he could stopping the drummer from Lawrence down easy).
When Chris and Aurore started the orchestra,” says Maine-bred bassist Wormwood, 29, [they] were doing customary common music as a duo, which is where I contrive some people potty c execute the ‘Americana’ bits. But there’s also a amount of present-day bits that we’re into: R.E.M., the Pixies, actuate another music.”
For Keene, people like Dylan, John Lennon, and Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain were damp, inspirational forces. I get into to rigorous emotions. When I ineffectual up to music, I ineffectual up to it to outside something,” Keene says.
When you gather ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ or you gather Kurt Cobain cry, you can’t good notice there and not outside anything.”
Ounjian began playing customary common music on acoustic guitar as a practice to search dulcet textures and modes of assertion beyond the angst-fueled menace of grunge. It was a meritorious replacement,” she says. It remarkably was inspiring to pick up a guitar and harmonica and fillet the entirety down and not distinct on lyrics and graphic vocal melodies as contrasted with of good screeching guitars.” She pauses and smiles.