Review: Darlingside’s acoustic spaciness travels well on new release, at Seven Steps Up

Darlingside is bassist Dave Senft, guitarist and banjo player Don Mitchell, classical violinist and folk mandolinist Auyon Mukharji, and cellist and guitarist Harris Paseltiner. (supplied/Gaelle Beri)

By K.D. Norris

ken@wktv.org

Darlingside, with new music from Extralife, April 18, at Seven Steps Up, Spring Lake, Mi.

There should be a natural progression with new bands, a growth in their music as well as in their collective and individual lives, before they hit their stride, find a distinctive sound that resonates with an often unfathomable public taste.

Darlingside — an alt-folk, harmony-driven quartet currently based in Boston — showed they are very, very close to that harmonic sweet spot as they played to a sell-out room at Spring Lake’s Seven Steps Up listening house earlier this month.

The band is made up of Don Mitchell, Auyon Mukharji, Harris Paseltiner and David Senft — and labeling them as acoustic multi-instrumentalists would be an understatement. Describing their sound can also be challenging, but anybody who has heard Simon and Garfunkel at their harmonic heights, or the Beach Boys early empty-swimming-pool effect, can imagine the harmonies these guys deliver.

With the release of their third full-length recording, Extralife, early this year, the band has now added another layer of sonic scenery to their concert landscape — a kind of spacey, otherworldly sound — and to a catalogue started in 2012 with Pilot Machines and given full voice in 2015 with Birds Say. (The band has also released two EPs, including one from its infancy and now simply titled EP1 in 2010, and Whippoorwill in 2016. Neither are throwaways.)

I have been lucky enough to follow Darlingside since their beginnings, literally their college days at Massachusetts’ Williams College — at a college kid drinking establishment/alumni club known as “The Log”. (Ya, you just can’t make that stuff up.)

My wife and I have seen them, we decided, five times over eight years, the first time probably in 2009, and (before last week) when they opened for Lake Street Dive at Meijer Gardens in 2016.

They have changed over the years, but only in their expanding boundaries of their music as the uniqueness of their nearly percussion-free sound, string-dominated instrumentation, and single-mic two-, three- and four-voice harmonies remains their hallmark.

At their recent stop at Seven Steps Up, and at other recent stops in the band’s current tour, several songs from the Extralife have blended — and yet contrasted — with live mainstays from throughout their career.

Songs such as the almost a cappella “The God of Loss” from Birds Say and the sometimes set-ending “Blow the House Down” from Pilot Machines, are personal favorites and remain so.

But new songs such as “Singularity”, “Extralife”, “Hold Your Head High” and “Best of the Best of Times”, while maybe more dark in theme than some of their early music, fit their style perfectly while still pushing the band’s sound into a more (for lack of a better term) spacey place.

In fact, some of the songs off Extralife would be at home on Hearts of Space, National Public Radio’s ethereal, ambient sound showcase (also available on its own website).

“Extralife” is as otherworldly as its is melancholy. The harmonies of “Singularity” cannot hide the beautiful bleakness of the lyrics: “Someday a shooting star is gonna shoot me down … Burn these high rises back into a ghost town … Of iridium-white clouds … Matted close against the ground … While the sky hangs empty as a frame”.

OK, so the boys are a little more serious then they were back at The Log.

Not that Darlingside has gone all downer and dour with Extralife. On “Best of the Best of Times” the band offers a driving beat and an admission that “We are a long way, a long way from the best of times.”