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Faith healers
The Danielson Famile

BY DAMON SMITH

The young band who strode on stage in V-neck nurses’ uniforms bearing their names and emblazoned with bright red hearts last month at the Middle East looked the very antithesis of anything rock. You wouldn’t have known it from the group’s humble stage manner — or from the smoke-filled rock-club surroundings — but the Danielson Famile, an openly Christian avant-indie-folk-pop band from New Jersey, had come to Cambridge on a healing mission. And the outfits emphasized the point. Not until they’d unleashed a fusillade of unholy noises on “Rubbernecker” and gently persuaded the hiply attired crowd to clap their hands during the chorus of “Sing to the Singer” did it become evident that these fresh-faced Florence Nightingales belonged here instead of at a Sunday-night revival meeting.

Since the release of their first album, A Prayer for Every Hour (Tooth & Nail), in 1995, the Danielsons have carved a niche for themselves as visionary evangelicals of an odd sort. The bizarre gospel feel of their catchy songs is the work of eldest brother Daniel Smith, who brought siblings Megan, Rachel, David, and Andrew together in 1994 to perform songs he had written for his senior art thesis at Rutgers. With a simple battery of bells, drums, keyboards, piano, and acoustic guitar, these inspired born-agains have redefined the context in which Christian rock can, and does, thrive.

In recent years, the low-key emo-folk stylings of Pedro the Lion and Low have helped open the door for Christian performers aiming to do more than just emulate big-name pop acts, as is the general rule in commercial Christian rock. The Danielsons, however, have exploded the conventions of Christian music altogether, by virtue of their sonic adventurousness. Although they’ve often been compared to another cult sibling group, the Shaggs, the Danielsons aren’t nearly as unselfconscious — or as adorably incompetent — as the plaid-skirted Wiggins sisters. With a manic songwriting approach that owes something to the over-the-top hootenannies of the Holy Modal Rounders, and a vocal style that calls to mind Austin’s troubled troubadour Daniel Johnston, they’ve even come close to being too out there for college radio.

On their new Fetch the Compass, Kids (Secretly Canadian), the Danielsons shed some of their darker elements, especially the creepy minimalist feel of their 1997 Tell Another Joke at the Ol’ Choppin’ Block (Tooth & Nail). Engineered by noisemeister Steve Albini, the album emphasizes staccato blasts of percussion and abrupt melodic shifts. On oddly upbeat tracks like “Good News for the Pus Pickers” and “Let Us ABC,” the band match the lo-fi traveling circus feel of bands like Olivia Tremor Control and Elf Power. On the title track, a slow-bleed acoustic intro leans a bit on Neil Young and then soars into a maelstrom of “Hallelujah”-accented knob twisting and electro-buzzsaw effects, creating an appropriate aural set piece for Daniel’s sublime musings. When he squeezes out an obscure line like “Of all my needs/The greatest one/Will I turn into/The compass passion,” he delivers it with such tenderness and conviction that literal meanings hardly matter.

Daniel’s poignant, strained falsetto and the flat-pitched harmonies his sisters employ to counterbalance his ecstatic squeals bring to mind a clan of childlike primitives happily delivering themselves to a higher purpose. Only the enchanting duet on “Can We Camp at Your Feet,” with its ethereal chorus and sinister piano line, speaks to the band’s more refined orchestral abilities. Daniel’s playful word rhymes (“The wheel within wheel in the sky is for real” from “The Wheel Made Man”) add to the sense that there is a Blakean poet at the heart of this family project, one who favors oblique symbolism over the time-worn imagery of Christendom.

Instead of easy-to-register religious themes, Compass offers a stew of mystical metaphors (trees, wheels, compass kids) and a heartfelt skewering of our cultural priorities (the fetish for celebrity, worldly success, the get-ahead mentality). Singing itself becomes the balm of Gilead for all existential woes, and homemade psalms are the basic unit of the Danielson universe. “Good and bad, we’re gonna sing the wide and long and high and deep, O Lord,” they sing in the hand-clapping chorus of “Singers Go First.” But if there is any message embedded in this musical merry-go-round, it’s that the anxieties and the pace of modern life have opened a collective wound that only creative expression rooted in faith can begin to heal. No wonder, then, that the Danielsons like to perform in those vintage nurse uniforms. Faith healing isn’t solely the province of televangelists and roadside prophets.

Issue Date: April 26 - May 3, 2001





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