Tonight: Scout Niblett at the Mohawk

Scout Niblett takes the inside stage tonight at Mohawk. While Niblett has been labeled as freak folk, that label seems increasingly an unfortunate catchall for anything that can’t be called indie rock or otherwise neatly filed in some familiar genre.

Niblett, who has collaborated with Steve Albini on several albums including her latest, The Calcination of Scout Niblett (Drag City, 2010), draws inspiration from a renegade fringe that has room for Cat Power (to whom she’s garnered frequent comparisons) but also for Jandek. She shares with the latter a kind of unfettered access to her own angst, which is not suggest that her catalog is fueled by a single emotional note, but only that when she does veer into expressions of her own pain, the result is anything but twee. Songs sometimes unexpectedly swell into a cacophony of electric guitars and screaming feedback, Niblett’s own voice providing the only through line to carry listeners from the song’s earlier rattlings to its ultimate explosion. Others rely on clanging, pots-and-pans style percussion almost as punctuation, and sometimes, songs hover uncomfortably in the territory of conventional folk, offering only the occasional glimmer of audio turmoil.

Screamingly intimate, Niblett’s music often reveals her idiosyncratic obsession with astrology, which shows up in song and album titles and in proclamations that astrology helps her predict when she should head to the studio. In The Calcination of Scout Niblett, this obsession is at the very heart, the work’s title taken from the process of purification by fire essential to alchemy. The Calcination of Scout Niblett is demanding in its intimacies, requiring listeners to follow along closely in order to follow at all. Without careful attention, tracks like the title track become difficult to parse, and even those tracks that rely on melodic hooks, like “Duke of Anxiety” retain a kind of uncertainty, the implication they could come unglued at any point. The record itself seems to be an act of alchemy, bits of folk and grunge and indie rock fused into something strange and challenging.

Scout Niblett [] [MySpace]