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Erin McKeown
WE WILL BECOME LIKE BIRDS
(Nettwerk)
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This 27-year-old Virginia-born singer-songwriter has released a handful of fine albums that are more interested in finding out where folk music can go than investigating the purity of its past. We Will Become like Birds, McKeown’s fourth studio disc, is her big art-pop move. Although it still has plenty of the strummed acoustic guitars and shuffling drums on which she’s built her sound, there are more keyboards and in-studio effects, and she sounds less tethered to folk, even if she’s not quite sure what she wants to make instead. That’s a good thing: the quiet grace of the lullaby "Float" is just that much more pronounced next to "Beautiful (I Guess)," a slyly grooving bit of percussive pop, and "Air," which imagines what Chicagoans the Sea and Cake would sound like if fronted by Suzanne Vega. In "The Golden Dreams," McKeown gets help from Argentine singer Juana Molina, who maintains a comparable relationship with folk idioms; the two make beautifully indescribable music together. Erin McKeown | June 29 | Paradise Rock Club, 967 Comm Ave, Boston | 617.228.6000.
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