BY JENNIFER KELLY

It's a night for hushed harmonies, winding clarinet duets and eerie musical saws, as the Low Anthem, out of Rhode Island, swings back through the east, headlining for the first time this evening in Northampton (though they've been here before on a secondary slot for Ray LaMontagne).    

It starts with Canadian folk/bluesman Timber Timbre, a pseudonym for lanky Taylor Kirk, who records, currently, for the Arts & Crafts label.  As I arrive, he is hunched spider-like over a well-worn acoustic guitar, one foot on the kick drum, one eye to his bandmates on lap steel and violin, respectively.  A very slow, atmospheric blues emerges, moving forward on funereal thumps of bass drum, with waltz-timed guitar flurries blossoming out of gothic shadows.  A fine, down tempo spookiness haunts these contemporary murder ballads, where one love pulls another out from under the wheels, another contemplates the likelihood of ghosts.  A layer of high, spectral violin floats over glacially syncopated drums, as Kirk intones "There is a house in New Orleans," but it's not "The House of the Rising Sun."  Later, the pace picks up, just noticeably, in a weary roadhouse swagger.  "I must be under your spell," Kirk murmurs, as the music swells in a sad two-step, and you can picture broken lovers whirling in melancholy across a faded pine floor. 

Low Anthem, when they take the stage, are altogether lighter and more lovely, picking among a junk-shop's worth of instruments, multiple guitars, electric and stand-up bass, glockenspiel, two clarinets, some sort of brass horn, pump organ and keyboards.  Ben Knox Miller sits first at a keyboard housed in some sort of antique cabinet, his slouchy fedora casting deep shadow over his face.  His earliest collaborator, Low Anthem co-founder Jeff Prystowsky, stands behind on gleaming double bass.  Jocie Adams stands with a bow at the glockenspiel, coaxing, weird, slippery sounds out of their shiny surfaces, and Mat Davidson mans a musical saw.  Yet the minute you get a handle on who they are and what they play, everyone switches instruments.  Almost everyone in the band will get a chance at the drum set before the night finishes and most will play some version of either guitar or bass.  Miller handles most of the singing, but he is often supported by wonderful harmonies in three and four parts, everyone at the mic, eyes closed at the prettiness of it all. 

Over the night, the Low Anthem revisits much of their last album Oh My God, Charlie Darwin, tries out a few new songs (one nicely rustic one called "At the Apothecary") and slips in some traditional numbers, including a rousing, giddily harmonized version of "Evangeline" late in the show.  They move, with relative ease, from the lovely, subdued lyricism of Iron & Wine-ish "Ticket Taker" with its winding threads of clarinet or "Cage the Songbird" with its sharp, octave leaping melancholies, to the flat-out raucous-ness of "Home I'll Never Be," with Adams on electric bass, belting like a blues singer. 

For "This God Damn House," even the Low Anthem's extensive collection of instruments falls short.  Miller instructs the audience that after the second chorus, he wants all of them to take out their cell phones and call the person they came with and talk to them.  When the moment comes, you hear a few buzzes and rings, and see Miller himself, up at the mic with two cell phones, feeding their tones through mics and effects for a ghostly, lonely sound.  Later, the band finds extraordinary sounds in a far more traditional corner when Prystowsky gets an extended bass solo, his hands jumping and twitching in a percussive, slapped-and-popped tour de force.  When the band finally steps in, he is grinning ear to ear and the audience gives him a hand, jazz concert style, for his efforts.

But loud or soft, on traditional instruments or jerry-rigged technology, the Low Anthem sounds wonderful, much better in fact, than its album.  There's a wistful gorgeousness in the slow songs, a gutsy fire in the faster ones that just doesn't come through as well via the recording process, and if you're wondering about the Low Anthem, I'd recommend you get out and catch them live. 

Read the BLURT interview with the Low Anthem here.