The Brooklyn band's second album takes its cues from folk, but not the kind that gathers children around a crackling campfire. Instead, Grace & Lies is unnerving, inscrutable, and restrained in a fashion that only exacerbates the listener's curiosity.
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Family BandVia Pitchfork
The core of Family Band consists of the Brooklyn couple Kim Krans, a visual artist who had never written a song before they formed Family Band, and Jonny Ollsin, a lifelong metal-and-thrash guitarist who eventually tired of his life in metal and thrash. Together, with bassist and lap steel player Scott Hirsch, they make stark, startling music that resembles folk in outline-- muted, pastoral, mostly voice and guitar. But it's not the kind of folk that gathers children around a crackling campfire; frozen, pitilessly bleak, and foreboding, it's the kind that catalogs Biblical miseries, more "ashes, ashes, we all fall down" than "this land is your land."
It would be easy to assume Ollsin brought this darkness from his time in the metal trenches, but spending time with their alluring second record, Grace & Lies, it seems equally likely that it comes from Krans. Her voice is transfixing: husky, deep, unnervingly still. Her lyrics are inscrutable but unsettling reports from a series of seriously bad mental states. "This house is dark/ Nothing moves inside" ("Night Song") is a typical lyric, and the numb, hollow, affectless way she sings it a typical delivery. Her imagery is vivid but unspecific, allowing meanings to accumulate in the unexplained spaces like snow drifts. "Give the young one up/ Set the old one free," she murmurs on "Again".
Ollsin's guitar playing is stark and restrained, serving mostly to dribble ice-cold droplets on the base of your neck. You can hear his metal background in his somber gray tone, and many of his lines resemble the contemplative interludes spliced between heavier numbers on metal albums. The tribal thump and palm-muted downstroke of "Lace" seems moments away from splitting into roaring distortion; of course, it never does, but the implied menace adds iron boots to what is otherwise a soft, subdued album.
Listening to Grace & Lies can be taxing; it feels at moments like succumbing slowly to emotional frostbite. But Krans and Ollsin stir in a few furtive warm pockets to keep their record from freezing over. "Moonbeams" is a mesmerizing, drowsy ballad in which a single reverb-laden guitar rings softly underneath a thin synth, while Krans breathes the refrain, "I gotta hear your wondering sound." Like everything she says, it stirs unnameable sensations: What is a wondering sound? The song isn't answering. In fact, Krans ends it on a hanging note so tantalizing it feels almost like a joke: "Do you know what I want?/ I will tell you just what I want," she mutters. Your ears prick; you lean in. But that's it; the song ends right there, trailing off with a sigh into silence. End transmission.