The Swell Season; The Low Anthem @ Prospect Park

The Swell Season; The Low Anthem
@ Prospect Park
Brooklyn, NY - July 30, 2010

When Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová starred in the miraculous 2007 movie Once, most who saw it said it was a great love story. A few, wiser, people saw it for what it really was: a great story about how an album gets made. These actors were musicians after all. So rather than become big movie stars after the stunning victory at the Oscars for Best Song, the duo went back to what they really know - crafting folk pop (slightly melo-)drama but this time playing to hundreds of thousands of people around the world.

In support of a new record, Strict Joy, the Swell Season came to Brooklyn to play to a hypnotized, but almost manic crowd. "Low Rising" from Strict Joy represented the best of where the Swell Season are going - soulful, deep seeded pop music. So no surprise when they later turned out Van the Man's "Into the Mystic", with a backing New York horn section. And they kept the orchestral machinations of the Once soundtrack to a minimum , focusing instead on electric and acoustic guitars, relying on one solid fiddle player for strings. And of course they shined strongest on the sparse acoustic torch songs, just the two of them on "Falling Slowly" (the way the song was meant to be played), and Glenn in particular on the almost over-the-top-it's-so-good "Say It To Me Now".

Meanwhile, The Low Anthem just about stole the damn show. The Low Anthem are a band, and Oh My God, Charlie Darwin is a record, that personifies American roots without immediately summoning a particular brand of it. What's evoked is a creeky, wooden empty room in a house, about sundown, and a few candles or incandescent bulbs alight in a chandelier. The guitars, the horns, the keys, the saw, that amazing upright bass (with a solo for the books) - the ghosts of America, thoughtful and contemplative, lost. Something where Moby Dick, Andrew Jackson, the Civil War, and Leadbelly have a get together.

The Swell Season and the Low Anthem had a get together themselves by the end of the night, with Josh Ritter to boot, in a fitting rendition of the ol' "You Ain't Going Nowhere".