Music: Bowerbirds Soar Into The Mohawk With Upper Air Tonight

North Carolina's Bowerbirds couldn't be more understated in their approach. When we last saw them at South By Southwest, they hardly looked big enough to be a band, and they didn't have much equipment. Yet when they started playing, the crowd fell silent, and some beautiful and unexpectedly huge sounds emerged. The combination of he/she vocal harmonies, basic acoustic guitar, and simple percussion somehow emerges as something greater than the individual parts.

While the popular indie music pendulum has swung in a direction favoring Bowerbirds, it is plain that they aren't jumping on the Fleet Boxes / Sam Beam bandwagon: they are who they've always been, and the world is now ready to meet them. Given our experience with their live shows, we can't recommend this enough. The band arrive at The Mohawk tonight in support of their new disc Upper Air, which Pitchfork described as an "immersive listening experience that can yield beauty and magic" and AllMusic called both "quietly fiery" and "the kind of thing that brings to mind Arcade Fire's best moments." No small amount of praise there, eh?

There's also a compelling reason to turn up early, as Durham's Megafaun are supporting on the bill tonight. If you've not yet heard of them, the band sprung from the remants of DeYarmond Edison, which was essentially Megafaun plus Justin Vernon (aka Bon Iver.) While Vernon perfects his acoustic pining, Megafaun have spun in a different direction, hanging out with Akron/Family and generally pursuing a noisier, more abstract brand of folk. That said, they know how to work a conventional song structure as well - that's just not what they do all the time. The quality of work Megafaun is doing these days may actually be setting up a new Jay Farrar versus Jeff Tweedy-type situation with Bon Iver, which is great for music listeners everywhere. We suggest you catch them before they're headlining.

Bowerbirds: [official] [MySpace]
Megafaun: [official] [MySpace]