Author: Stephen Deusner

Earlier this year, singer-songwriter Sharon Van Etten got the call that every young musician anxiously anticipates: One of her heroes asked her to sing with him. Rufus Wainwright was a fan of the New Jersey-born, Brooklyn-based musician’s nakedly direct indie-folk songs and recruited her to duet with him on a cover of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” which appears on the new Christmas compilation Holidays Rule.

“Honestly,” she says with a laugh, “I thought I was going to go into the studio and just add my vocals to a pre-recorded track. But when I showed up at Avatar Studios in Manhattan, suddenly I’m face to face with Rufus Wainwright. I almost peed my pants when I realized we were both going to be singing at the same time in vocal booths facing each other. My inner fan was trying not to explode.”

Van Etten has reached that precipitous point in her career when her heroes are becoming her colleagues. Looking at the list of artists she’s performed with, it’s clear she’s become the Kevin Bacon of Brooklyn, with no other musician separated by more than six degrees. She covered John Denver with J Mascis on an upcoming tribute album and has performed Appalachian folk songs with Megafaun. She’s toured with Beirut, Kyp Malone of TV on the Radio, and the National, whose Aaron Dessner produced her album Tramp.

“For bands that you really love, you put them up on a pedestal,” Van Etten explains. “You don’t think that you’re going to see them work out a melody in front of you. You don’t think of them as being actual human beings or that they’re fans of other music as well.”

It’s not difficult to see why Van Etten has proved so popular among her fellow musicians. On three very different albums in three years, she has displayed a keen intuition as a singer and a songwriter. Vocally, she plays with meter and key like an Americanized Nico, such that she can move gracefully between strident and wounded, resigned and determined, open and guarded. Lyrically, she confronts many of the issues that confessional songwriters have been addressing for decades — relationships teetering on the brink, connections long severed, crippling self-doubt — but her simultaneously direct and impressionistic style breathes new life into familiar subject matter.

Van Etten has come a long way in a short time. In the mid-2000s, she was living in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, with a boyfriend who discouraged her musical efforts; she practiced guitar and wrote songs in secret. Then she moved back to New Jersey, where she lived with her parents and made frequent forays into New York City to perform. In 2009, she released her debut album, Because I Was in Love, on Language of Stone, a Philadelphia label that specializes more in otherworldly freak-folk than in Van Etten’s brand of earthy realism.

Eventually, she moved to Brooklyn, where she took a job at a wine store as well as an unpaid internship at Ba Da Bing Records. “My initial reaction to New York was secluding myself and feeling unworthy,” she recalls. “But you meet people who believe in you and help you let your guard down, and that helps you become more confident.” It took a while for her to reveal her own musical aspirations to her co-workers at Ba Da Bing, but the label released her second album in 2010. Where Because had been austere and intimate, Epic fitted her with a lush, full-band backdrop, revealing new facets of her talent.

Even on her third album, Tramp, Van Etten’s songs are for many listeners inseparable from her story. They aren’t simply the artifacts of her romantic, social, and psychological struggles but documents of them. “Most of my songs are very stream-of-conscious, so whether they’re consciously about me or about friends, they’re all very autobiographical,” she explains. “I always want the listeners to feel like I’m talking to them, confiding in them, or expressing myself to them. I try to write in a way that they don’t feel sorry for me that I had to go through something painful. I make it general enough so they can stop thinking it’s just about me. It’s about not being alone.”

As she continues touring behind Tramp and gathering songs for her fourth album, Van Etten is trying to expand her songwriting approach to match her larger musical canvas.

“One thing I want to learn how to do better is writing more stories and taking myself out of it while still connecting with the listener. It doesn’t come naturally right now, but I’m hoping, eventually, I can separate myself a little more and see how that works.”

What she never wants to do is come off as somehow inhuman to her fans, although being a fan herself, Van Etten understands that is nearly impossible.

“I want to help my fans feel like I’m a human being and a normal person. The experience of putting people on a pedestal and then having them be so humble — it helped me reformulate my idea about what being a performer in my world is like. You want to be on the same level [as your audience]. The main purpose of my songs is to heal and feel better. It’s therapy for me, and I want it to be the same for my audience. Otherwise, it’s a very selfish thing for me to be doing.”

Sharon Van Etten, with Damien Jurado

Hi-Tone Café, Sunday, November 4th, 8 p.m., $12

In 2006, I wrote a review of Band of Horses’ debut album, Everything All the Time, and in retrospect, I think I approached it all wrong. I opened by quoting a chorus of their breakout song “The Funeral” (“At every occasion I’m ready for a funeral”) and talking about the recent death of a loved one. In the months leading up to that sad event, I jumped whenever the phone rang, my stomach falling with dread of the worst news. Living far from family, I knew to keep my bags packed. I had to be ready for a funeral.

“The Funeral” seemed not only to express a painfully familiar feeling but to make it sound epic and immense — as large as the effect that actual funeral would have on my life. That is not exactly what the song is about, but both musically and lyrically, Everything All the Time introduced a band adept at writing songs specific enough to catch your ear but loose enough that you could burden them with your own interpretations.

I expect many fans felt a similar attachment to Band of Horses’ music, which made Everything All the Time one of the more promising debuts of the 2000s. It arrived at a moment when indie rock seemed capable of a kind of modest majesty, an outsize sound that could be cinematic without being soundtrack-y and uplifting without resorting to schmaltz. The group bore the weight of endless comparisons: Ben Bridwell’s reverbed vocals recalled My Morning Jacket, his peppy melodies suggested the Shins, and the band’s granola crunch belied a deep knowledge of Neil Young’s greatest hits. And yet, the album — and, to a lesser extent, Band of Horses’ follow-up, Cease To Begin — combined trendy sounds in a way that transcended trendiness.

In 2012, however, it’s hard not to feel like I put too much of myself out there in my review of Everything All the Time. I stand by my praise of the album, but Band of Horses has strayed so far from their original mission that I wonder if the weight of such personal projection was too much to bear. Since their debut, the band has been in near constant upheaval, with founding member Mat Brooke leaving the band, Bridwell moving from Washington State to North Carolina, and a new lineup solidifying around the time of their third full-length and major-label debut, Infinite Arms, in 2010.

In fact, Bridwell referred to that album as Band of Horses’ true debut, since it introduced a semi-permanent lineup, but it sounds slack and skittish, like a band that had lost its ability to discern what it did well and what lay beyond its reach. For every keeper like “Dilly” on that album, there is a stinkbomb like “Factory,” which shows just how lenient Bridwell’s internal editor has become: “Now or later, I was thinking it over by the snack machine,” he sang, straight-faced. “I was thinking about you in a candy bar.” Worse, the music on Infinite Arms sounds just as unwieldy, with keyboards curdling into a parody of the uplift the band once achieved so gracefully.

Released last month, Band of Horses’ Mirage Rock compounds these bad impulses. Bridwell pens some real clunkers, ranging from goofball mawkish to disturbingly naive.

This precipitous drop-off in Band of Horses’ music is unfortunate, if only because they once seemed intent on upending indie rock’s notorious insularity. By making a virtue of hippie-dippiness and turning lyrics like “The world is such a wonderful place” into a raise-your-lighter-apps anthem, Bridwell actually sounded subversive in the 2000s. But now, Bridwell seems to have finally embraced his inner bro, content to sound lazily chummy like a postmillennial Seals & Croft.

About halfway through Water Liars’ debut, Phantom Limb, an eerie voice breaks through the drone and dirge of the duo’s dark indie country, testifying about terrestrial birth and man as lord of the earth and the sea. “Arise, O Man, in thy strength!” the speaker exalts, as if emanating through an old Victrola. “The kingdom is thine to inherit.” This is not the voice of singer-guitarist Justin Kinkel-Schuster or that of drummer Andrew Bryant. It’s actually an archival recording of renowned occultist and Thelemite leader Aleister Crowley, whose sampled presence only makes the song that much spookier.

Immediately following Crowley’s short sermon, Water Liars veer abruptly into a lonely, low-key rendition of “It Is Well with My Soul,” the 1871 hymn written by Horatio Spafford following the tragic deaths of his four daughters. It’s a jarring juxtaposition, and it might seem like a cheap stunt if the rest of Phantom Limb didn’t play out these spiritual extremes so thoroughly. This is an album about deep, almost existential uncertainty, evoked not only in gothic acoustic dirges but in eerie ambient samples of machinery, wildlife, traffic, and unidentifiable dins that might as well represent the soul in torment.

The Crowley speech was a last-minute addition to Phantom Limb. Kinkel-Schuster had downloaded an archival recording and played it for Bryant while they were recording the album.

“I’m not a disciple or anything,” Kinkel-Schuster explains, “but like a lot of people, I find the world of the occult to be really interesting. I thought it worked well on that song and creates a nice tension — between occult and faith, good and evil.”

The duo recorded Phantom Limb in Pittsboro, Mississippi, a small town about half an hour south of Oxford. Bryant was born and raised there and continues to live there. “It’s a small sawmill town,” says the drummer. “I grew up in a sawmill family. That’s what my dad does. That’s what my granddad did.” Bryant himself works at the sawmill when he’s not touring with Water Liars.

Kinkel-Schuster hails from farther north — St. Louis, in fact, where he had been a rising star in the city’s indie-rock scene as the frontman for the band Theodore. When that band died, he ventured south to visit his friend, and the two ended up recording a set of rickety tunes on a rainy weekend. “It was about him getting out of the city,” Bryant says of his Missouri bandmate. “He really wanted to get into a small-town type of environment, where he could just hang out and play music.”

They set up a makeshift studio in Bryant’s house and crafted nine lo-fi tracks that skirt the edges of dread-motivated country and mid-century field recordings. The sessions were quick and intense: “The way to keep things spontaneous,” Bryant says, “is to do it as fast as possible. Don’t overthink it.” That process prizes intuition over deliberation and results in moments like the Crowley-Spafford juxtaposition on “It Is Well with My Soul” or the heavy electric chords that ring in the skeletal acoustic opener, “$100.”

Perhaps more than any musical influence, the small-town setting defines the album, not only its clenched sense of isolation and remoteness but also its reliance on ambient noises to sustain that mood. “I work doing manufacturing with my uncle and at the sawmill with my dad, so I was listening to a lot of those noises — trains and machinery and stuff,” Bryant says. “When I listen to records, even some of those old Alan Lomax tapes, I always like the sounds that you heard that weren’t part of the song.”

“For me,” Kinkel-Schuster says, “when I think of any record that I love, or any movie or book or whatever, you want it to be a world that you can go to, a world that contains itself.” On Phantom Limb, that world may literally be Pittsboro, but it evokes a larger one, a gothic South of legend and literature.

Water Liars are already working on their next album, trying to preserve that sense of creative serendipity even though they know they can’t reproduce the same circumstances that produced Phantom Limb. When they recorded their debut, they weren’t even sure they were a real band; now, as with any band preparing its sophomore album, there are expectations attached to whatever they do. “We know what we’re going to do with the new songs, but we try not to play them too much,” Bryant says. “When we do start recording, I like to just let it be what it’s going to be. We have a plan, but we’re going to mess with it as much as possible.”

It’s unlikely Crowley will show up again as a third member of Water Liars. His speech was particular to a time and place, and who knows what old recording the band will fixate on during their next sessions? “Making a record is making a document of a period of time,” Kinkel-Schuster says. “That’s how I think about any record. To me, it’s in the word itself. A record is a document of the period, the time that you spend working on it.”

Water Liars

Murphy’s

Sunday, October 7th

Two songs into Beach House’s fourth album, Bloom, there’s a moment that jars the carefully crafted drama. As Daniel Franz’s drum machine begins its stoic rhythm and Alex Scally’s guitar darts around the edges of “Wild,” Victoria Legrand intones, “My mother said to me that I would get in trouble/Our father won’t come home ’cause he is seeing double.”

With that rigid rhyme scheme and hint of everyday horror, these lines provide the most concrete imagery on Bloom, implying something like actual autobiography — an adult reminiscence of youthful peril. Ostensibly, “Wild” reveals something specific about its creators, which is unusual because the members of Beach House insist that they inhabit only the margins of their own songs.

The music is broadly romantic, the lyrics studiously unforthcoming. Few acts get as popular as Beach House — a best-selling album, laudatory reviews, festival appearances around the world, songs licensed to TV shows and movies — without giving more of themselves away.

Of course, Legrand won’t say whether those lines were inspired by her own upbringing. Instead, she undercuts the details, injecting further ambiguity into the lyrics.

“It could be me or it could be you,” she explains. “It could be both of us. It could be all of us. It’s coming from a personal place. It’s from me, from my insides. It doesn’t get more personal than that. Throughout all four of our albums there are many things that have come from my life, but I choose to start there and go somewhere further. It’s all about where it goes, not about picking apart one particular section.”

All Legrand will reveal is that those lines resonate powerfully for her, even if she doesn’t quite know what they mean:

“Those words came out immediately. They came out all together. I never changed them. Whether it was subconscious or whatever you want to call it, it was very natural. In French, there’s a saying — c’est juste — which means neither right nor wrong, but fair. Or just. It just is. That moment feels like that.”

The idea extends to nearly every aspect of Beach House’s music, suggesting art made on instinct by musicians who see themselves as conduits for something larger. All of their albums, but especially Bloom, strive for something universal, a sound and a size and a sentiment that everyone can understand. To achieve that effect without sounding generalized or generic, they cobble together certain aspects of post-punk, post-rock, krautrock, new wave, New Romanticism, and American soul music, although they run it all through a hazy filter that allows them to avoid predictable nostalgia. Beach House doesn’t wear ironic T-shirts or vintage glasses; they refuse to play to a particular moment in pop history. Their music sounds timeless, sceneless: of the moment more than of the past.

In fact, Beach House tries to stay out of the way as much as possible, forcing the listener to interact with the music undisturbed by artist ego or ambition. “That relationship between the listener and the music is a very precious thing,” Legrand says. “I love to converse about music, but it’s a Pandora’s box. It’s happened to me where I’ve found out something about a song I love, and it was almost like too much information. It was never the same to me. I know that it’s impossible to control that, but I think that mystery is worth holding on to.”

In fact, over the course of 10 songs, Bloom brokers the relationship between artist and audience, each song seemingly engaging the listener as the second-person “you.” “Help me to make it, help me to make it,” Legrand sings on the aptly titled “Myth.” “How’s it supposed to feel?” she asks on “Wishes.” She’s careful only to disclose “just enough to tell the story,” as the chorus of “New Year” goes, and the music reinforces the mystery, swelling and fading dramatically like an earthier Cocteau Twins or a more pelvic Low.

Maintaining the mystery in their music has become more and more difficult with each album and with each tour, as the band notches more fans and greater exposure through television and movie spots. After the release of Teen Dream in 2010, “there was a little bit more exposure,” Legrand says.

“We saw a direction we could go in, if we wanted, and we could have toured that album for two years. But we toured it for only one, which was for us totally reasonable. This wasn’t the record of our lives. We’re not done. We’re ready to make another album. That’s how we felt.”

Building on the lush sound of Teen Dream, Bloom debuted in the Billboard Top 10, which even in today’s market of depressed album sales was an accomplishment for such a determinedly press-averse band. Even as they continue to gain new fans and play bigger venues, Beach House is trying to think small, to hold on to some of that juste.

“No matter how many people like the band now, I still think about it as only 20 or so fans,” Legrand says. “So it’s still very personal, even if it’s a much bigger audience.”

Beach House, with Wild Nothing

Minglewood Hall

Thursday, July 12th, 8 p.m.; $16

Albums about lost loved ones, whether it’s the Arcade Fire grandiloquently mourning their grandparents on Funeral or Michael Stipe somberly eulogizing his parents on R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People, all possess a contradiction at their core. On the one hand, death is universal, and every listener has or will experience that loss at some point in their lives. On the other hand, the loss in question is entirely specific to the artist, such that only a handful of fans — if even that many — will have any personal stake in that particular loss.

Loss rock is, therefore, a risky subgenre: An artist risks alienating fans if he’s too specific or sounding saccharine if he’s too general. Ari Picker discovered these hazards while writing songs for A Church That Fits Our Needs, the third full-length from his North Carolina indie orchestra Lost in the Trees. The songs were inspired by the 2009 suicide of his mother. “I think my situation is certainly not unique,” he says. “It’s a universal thing, but I felt like it was so close to me that perhaps I could portray it in a unique and powerful way.”

In fact, it’s the uniqueness of Church — a sprawling, densely orchestrated record full of symphonic swells and lyrics that verge on magical realism — that lends the music its considerable power: Picker may be memorializing his mother, but he is not exactly sharing his pain. The album is guarded, labyrinthine, prickly — daringly private instead of openly public. The church of the title, it would seem, will fit only Picker and his mother and no one else. He allows us to witness his family grief but keeps us at a respectable distance.

This is not the first time Picker has written about the “domestic environment,” as he calls it. Lost in the Trees’ previous album, All Alone in an Empty House, addressed his early family life, obliquely recounting his parents’ fraying relationship and his place between them. “I wasn’t intending to do that again, but when my mom passed, I immediately knew that I needed to write about it,” Picker explains. “It wasn’t a romantic undertaking, though, like I’m struck with grief and everything just pours out of me. It was a very meticulous, painful, tooth-pulling process of finding the right melodies and textures and lyrics that would encapsulate everything I was feeling.”

Picker constructed a personal and peculiar mythology for A Church That Fits Our Needs, mingling 20th-century classical composition with elusive imagery about churches in the woods, dead birds, mystical twins, and golden armor. The real mingles with the fantastical, half fairy tale and half autobiography. “It’s a balancing act,” he says. “I didn’t want to be too on the nose with the lyrics, but it needed to be very simple at the same time. I really didn’t know how to express the complexity of all the emotions, the angry parts and the sad parts and the celebratory parts. I had to figure out how to blend those all together so that it’s not too heavy-handed and it’s not too theatrical.”

After writing the songs, recording them with the seven-member Lost in the Trees, and releasing the album via Anti- Records, Picker now must discuss the subject matter with journalists and fans who never met his mother. Perhaps more dauntingly, he has to sing about her every night onstage. He has learned to keep the creative and the promotional aspects of his job separate, and while his performances are certainly emotional, they are rarely overwhelming. “You’re not starting over at emotional square one every time you sing the songs,” he explains. “Touring, it’s really easy to lose context of a lot of things — particularly why the songs were written. You have plenty of time to overanalyze things, and they lose some of their context.”

Perhaps more difficult is re-creating the florid orchestrations of A Church That Fits Our Needs. Picker, who studied composition at Berklee College of Music in Boston, admits the band is still trying to devise the best way to replicate that dense sound onstage. “What’s beautiful about a stringed instrument is the air around it,” he says. “When you plug in a violin and you plug in an acoustic guitar and pump them through a club system, it’s going to sound like shit. We have so many people onstage, but the sound can be so damn small. We’re working to fill it out with keyboard and electric guitar, trying to get where we can be a wall of sound onstage.”

That long, careful process has already informed the songs Picker is writing for Lost in the Trees’ next record, which he says will be more modern sounding and groove oriented. It will not, however, be about his mother. “I don’t want to be the guy who always writes about his mom or something like that,” he says, “so the next record may be more about documenting exterior things instead of interior conversations. I’m just trying to keep writing and moving forward.”

Lost in the Trees with Daytona

The Hi-Tone Café

Wednesday, June 20th

9 p.m.; $10

When Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings tour, they don’t travel by tour bus or plane. Instead, they go by Cadillac. It’s a mode of transportation that has a long history in country music. “Many before us have realized that this is the best way to roll down the road,” Welch says. “It’s a tried-and-true thing. Hank Williams, Bill Monroe, the Band, Flatt and Scruggs — everybody used to drive a Cadillac.”

More than its illustrious history, however, a car is much more efficient for a duo who play acoustic instruments almost exclusively. It’s greener than a tour bus. “Plus, Dave’s allergic to diesel, so there’s that,” Welch says. Perhaps even more importantly, Cadillacs are comfortable and quiet. “They save your ears,” she explains. “The amount we drive, you have to have a quiet car or you get to the gig and your ears are all road rumbled.”

Welch and Rawlings started touring by Caddy a few years ago, often taking circuitous routes between shows, the better to see even more of the country. The duo prefer back roads through small towns over big interstates through bigger cities, which often puts them in close proximity to the primary subject of their austere country songs: America past and present.

“That’s really how we wrote this new record,” Welch says of the fourth album with her name on the spine, The Harrow and the Harvest. (Welch and Rawlings write and perform together, but typically only one of them gets artist credit.) “We crisscrossed the country I think eight times.”

What they saw was a lot of unhappy people struggling to get by in the current economic crisis. “I’m here to tell you that I’ve seen tens of thousands of miles of this country, and it was really something to behold,” Welch says. “I saw stuff that I’ve only seen in WPA photographs. People were having a rough time. I’m glad I saw it, though. I’m glad I was in touch with it. Dave put it beautifully — he said he felt a sort of gathering weight.”

The country’s bleak mood inspired the austere acoustic sound of The Harrow and the Harvest, which is her first album in nearly a decade. But it also inspired the songs’ subject matter: hard-luck tales of regular Americans at loose ends, forced into dire circumstances such as drug addiction, prostitution, or simple, abject hopelessness.

Welch and Rawlings are not singles artists; in fact, Welch explains they sent Harrow out to radio stations with no highlighted tracks and different stations chose different songs. But one song has stood out to them, the bluntly titled “Hard Times.” Illustrated by Rawlings’ spidery guitar licks and Welch’s grave vocals, it’s a typical Welch/Rawlings composition in that it’s written in character — specifically that of an old farmer working the ground with his beloved mule. “Hard Times” has become a fan favorite off The Harrow and the Harvest, perhaps thanks to its determined chorus: “Hard times ain’t gonna rule my mind.”

“By coincidence or whatever,” Welch says, “it really resonated with what a lot of people were going through economically, so I’m happy to say that those sorts of accidents happen. And they’re probably not accidents at all.”

Touring by car may have put Welch in touch with America in the 21st century, but her and Rawlings’ music is still rooted in the sepia-tone tinge of Depression-era folk music. Especially after the full-band, electric sound of 2003’s Soul Journey, the stark, stripped-down acoustic sound of The Harrow and the Harvest evokes Appalachian folk and Dust Bowl desperation without making the parallels between the Great Recession and the Great Depression too obvious. It’s timely but not necessarily political, topical but without the hokey self-seriousness of OWS folkies like Tom Morello and Bruce Springsteen.

“Every song Dave and I write has to have something in it that we think could make it somebody’s favorite song,” Welch says. “If it’s going to be depressing, make it so depressing that if a person loves depressing songs, it’s their favorite song. If it’s going to be silly, make it so silly that if a person really likes light, wry, witty songs, it’s their favorite song.”

The Harrow and the Harvest has many more depressing songs than silly songs, which is not to say that the album is a complete downer. Welch’s narrators are never truly hopeless, if for no other reason than she imbues them with great wit and wily grit — the necessary tools not only to tell their own stories but to survive in a country that has always been hard.

For Welch, though, traveling by car has not only given new resonance to her old subjects but has given her a new way to document the times she lives in with all their complexity intact. She sees the goodness as well as the heaviness: “If you’re feeling depressed or things are getting out of control, you can get in your car and drive around and see how much goodness is still out there. It’s not all messed up. People sometimes just bury their heads in the daily news and lose hope. To those people I would say, take a trip. Go see for yourself. Decide for yourself how it’s going.”

An Evening with Gillian Welch

Germantown Performing Arts Centre

Tuesday, June 12th

8 p.m.; $32.50

Outside of Mississippi, Jimbo Mathus may be best known as a founding member of the Squirrel Nut Zippers, the North Carolina-based outfit. Unfairly lumped in with the superficial swing revival of that decade, the Zippers were actually sophisticated stylists, blending hot jazz, ragtime, string-band, and any number of other styles. But over the past decade, via a variety of projects — including the Knockdown Society, the South Memphis String Band (with Luther Dickinson and Alvin Youngblood Hart), and his current band, the Tri-State Coalition — Mathus has devoted himself to the roots music of his home state, whether it’s blues, country, folk, jazz, or anything in between. Mathus’ most recent album, 2011’s Confederate Buddha, was directly inspired by the Alan Lomax Mississippi field recordings in the 1950s. It’s a collection of postmillennial country blues and Southern honky-tonk so deliriously slack it sounds like it was recorded in one take with no rehearsals. Jimbo Mathus & the Tri-State Coalition play the Levitt Shell on Saturday, May 26th. Showtime is 7:30 p.m. Free.

If you had visited Bear in Heaven’s website in the months leading up to the release of the band’s third album, I Love You It’s Cool, you would have heard an ambient piece of music full of long, low, strange, droning notes and a slo-mo burst of curious distortion. It was actually the new record slowed down 400,000 times, so that a single spin lasted 2,700 hours — or roughly 112 days. The music became utterly unrecognizable, albeit not utterly unlistenable.

“I’ve heard a fair amount of it,” drummer Joe Stickney says. “I’d get home after a long day at work, really late at night, and put it on. It helped me come down from my long bar-tending shift.”

That months-long stream is a clever twist on the strategies a lot of current bands regularly use to promote themselves. Bear in Heaven let you hear the album for free — just not in the form you expected.

“A lot of people thought we were taking the piss,” Stickney says, “but the idea evolved out of our desire to do an original ambient piece as a companion to this record. There’s just so much to do when it comes to getting a release together and getting all the wheels in motion. We just didn’t have enough time.” Thus, I Love You It’s Cool became its own ambient companion.

While that stream doesn’t give much of an idea how Bear in Heaven sound at regular speed, it does provide a useful impression of the audacity and cleverness with which they explore the intersections of music and technology. Based in Brooklyn, this band of Southern ex-pats play ambiently catchy (or catchily ambient) songs that straddle dance, pop, and rock and mix live guitars, drums, and vocals with carefully calibrated walls of synths. I Love You It’s Cool is a headphones album for the dance floor, digesting styles and influences that range from ELO to Orbital, from Can to Philip Glass, from New Romantics like A Flock of Seagulls to New Tribalists like Animal Collective.

In a few short years, Bear in Heaven have become one of the premier bands in Brooklyn, which is known for its robust indie rock scene.

“We spent a lot of years feeling out of place in New York because we didn’t seem to fit into any particular music scene,” Stickney says. “I feel like maybe we mix in better with what’s going on currently.”

Spacey and lushly textured, with subdued hooks that reveal new complexities with each listen, I Love You It’s Cool should cement Bear in Heaven’s reputation both locally and nationally as an adventurous band that not only integrates a wide swath of pop history but transforms it into something new and complex.

The group started in the late 1990s as a solo project for singer/keyboard player Jon Philpot, then based in Atlanta. When he moved to New York, the lineup expanded into a quintet. But the roster has proved variable over the years, as Bear in Heaven shed members with each new release.

They recorded 2009’s attention-getting Beast Rest Forth Mouth as a quartet, but after that album prompted a busy touring schedule, bass and synth player Sadek Bazaraa left the group to concentrate on his 9-to-5 job. Rather than replace him, which would have been financially unfeasible for the indie band, they figured out how to play everything as a three-piece. “It was a crazy process that gave Jon in particular a number of sleepless nights,” Stickney says. “He had to learn a lot of the new technology that we used on this record.”

While shedding members puts more demands on the musicians, it varies up the recording process as well as the results, making sure that each album has its own sonic personality. As the band has grown smaller, their sound has grown bigger and bolder with each release.

“Basically, every time we go to write a new record, it’s a new experience,” Stickney says. “This is the first time we’ve gotten together and written a full record without distraction.”

Bear in Heaven’s music is closely linked to the technology they use to write and to record their albums — numerous keyboards and synthesizers as well as computer programs and even the lighting set-ups in their live show.

The band’s mix of live and synthetic instrumentation necessarily determines how Bear in Heaven write and perform, but it also allows them to work just to the left of their influences, making references to so many different forebears without actually sounding like any of them. Perhaps the band’s crucial trait is its collective adaptability, by which they can use the demands of jobs, lineup changes, and new technologies to their best advantage.

“Our sound is always changing,” Stickney says. “But I think we’re retaining the crucial fragments that give our music its identity.”

Bear in Heaven, with Blouse and Doldrums

Hi-Tone Café, Sunday, April 22nd, 8 p.m.; $12

Omaha has always been an unlikely indie rock mecca. The largest city in a state that’s never had much of a grounded music tradition, Omaha is a business town full of insurance and agriculture companies like Mutual of Omaha, ConAgra, and Berkshire Hathaway (run by local boy done good Warren Buffett). It’s heartland territory, the “real America” that politicians regularly invoke but rarely represent.

Nevertheless, a local indie-rock sleeper cell awoke in the early 1990s, when local musicians Justin Oberst and Mike Mogis formed Lumberjack Records to release music by Omaha musicians. They eventually rechristened the label Saddle Creek Records, after a popular local thoroughfare, and it has all but defined the city’s music as an essentially songwriter-based enterprise, favoring permutations of heartland rock that prize earnestness first and punk energy a distant second. It’s the label that launched such Omaha acts as Now It’s Overhead, the Faint, Cursive, and Son, Ambulance, not to mention Bright Eyes (featuring Justin’s little brother Conor Oberst).

Those are all fairly diverse acts, but they’re united by their shared emphasis on song over sound — an approach that has dominated the local concert listings since Lumberjack Records released the cassette-only debut by then-14-year-old Conor. By the time he dueted with Emmylou Harris 10 years later — on Bright Eyes’ wildly popular I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning — the Omaha scene had lost much of its preeminence as many of its biggest acts left town, whether to relocate to Brooklyn or to tour almost endlessly. The city remains a vibrant arts center but has yet to produce a significant act since that first wave in the 1990s. But scenes are like zombies: They always come back different.

“Omaha’s music scene has become very diverse,” says Jenna Morrison, lead singer for local act Conduits. “A lot of people probably don’t know that. They might think it’s only singer-songwriter types, but the scene has grown pretty expansive over the years.”

Conduits may represent a new chapter in Omaha pop history. On their eponymous debut, released on Conor Oberst’s Team Love imprint (a sister label to Saddle Creek), the sextet explore sonic textures rather than lyrical sentiments, plumbing genres that traditionally have not held much sway in Omaha — shoegaze, slowcore, drone, and New Wave. “I feel like we definitely are outliers as far as what people know of the Omaha scene nationally,” Morrison says. “We aren’t singer-songwriters. An acoustic guitar would never fit into our music. Despite that, the city has definitely embraced us.”

Conduits aren’t local upstarts, though. The band members are all local veterans who have done time in a who’s who of Omaha bands, including the Good Life, Eagle Seagull, Neva Denova, and Son, Ambulance. Morrison joined the band after pestering guitarists/founders J.J. Idt and Nate Mickish to write music with her.

“We started practicing and writing and slowly collecting other members,” she explains. “We had an initial idea for what the sound would be like — very drony and very moody. We knew from the beginning what we wanted, but of course it’s morphed since we’ve all been playing and writing together.”

Conduits’ influences are hardly unique in indie-rock circles, which counts innumerable bands peddling updates on Joy Division, Slowdive, and Mazzy Star. Conduits certainly draws from those popular touchstones, but what distinguishes the band is their heaviness, which reaches an almost metal intensity. Their songs lurch and lumber dramatically, as Idt’s and Mickish’s guitars chime and crash and Patrick Newbery’s synths shiver and drone. Mike Overfield underscores songs like “Misery Train” and the eight-minute “Fish Mountain” with melodic basslines, while Morrison’s voice hovers above the din with an otherworldly detachment that recalls Hope Sandoval or Nico.

“We are definitely influenced by the bands that people have said we sound similar to,” Morrison says. “I wouldn’t say we’re not aware of it. But we’re not trying to sound like anybody specific.” Certain elements come through more onstage than they did in the studio. “It’s a bit more overwhelming live,” Morrison says. “I would say that you would be better off seeing us live than just listening to the album if you want to get the full feeling of the music. It’s as heavy as on the album, maybe even more so.”

Currently, Conduits are touring with Brooklyn’s Cymbals Eat Guitars and veteran Omaha act Cursive, but they’re looking ahead to their next album and hopefully a headlining tour. “We’ve already started writing for the next album and have a good catalog of stuff to tweak and expand,” Morrison says. “But we’re focusing on the now. There’s no telling what’s going to happen or what tours we might end up doing.”

If they can build off the promise of their debut, Conduits may not be Omaha outliers for very long. In fact, they may represent the future of their hometown scene.

Conduits, with Cursive and Cymbals Eat Guitars

Hi-Tone Café, Tuesday, April 17th

Doors at 8 p.m.; $15