Band of the Week: Bowerbirds

Hometown: Raleigh, N.C.
Fun Fact: Guitarist/vocalist Phil Moore and multi-instrumentalist Beth Tacular have spent the last year building an eco-friendly house all by themselves to replace their AirStream trailer.
Why They’re Worth Watching: Moore, Tacular and multi-instrumentalist Mark Paulson create truly organic folk songs, full of haunting melodies and honest lyrics without layers of production.
For Fans Of: Phosphorescent, The Avett Brothers, The Mountain Goats, Bon Iver

People stare as Phil Moore, Beth Tacular and Mark Paulson stroll around a candy store in New York. Paulson’s tapping and thudding in rhythm on a bass drum he has strapped to him, Tacular is squeezing her accordion while she harmonizes sweetly and Moore is playing his acoustic guitar and singing about things like bur oaks and talons as he wanders. He turns to the side so he doesn’t whack the guitar’s neck on the corn-syrup-laden shelving. This isn’t how one normally behaves in a retail space, but these three have an excuse. Together, they’re the North Carolina band Bowerbirds, and their sparse, pretty arrangements mingle with gummy bears and multi-colored wrappers as they film this live session for La Blogotèque.

The irony here lies in the fact that Bowerbirds, in concept and execution, have proved themselves anything but intentionally commercial. When the trio released its debut, Hymns For A Dark Horse, last year on small N.C. label Burly Time, the album could only be found in seven or eight record stores in the whole country. It was under the radar, a dark horse candidate, appropriately, for the lists of the year’s best albums, but the waves of approval and rave reviews nonetheless poured in. Blogs began buzzing; talk escalated about the trio with the acoustic instruments and naturalistic tendencies. “Nobody really expected any of that attention at all,” Moore reflects. “We were just happy playing shows with our friends in North Carolina. And we didn’t even really think about touring around the country even, back then.” But offers came, and they ended up sharing bills with one of their biggest supporters, John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats, as well as others like John Vanderslice, Phosphorescent, and now, Bon Iver.

They came across to their expanded audience like a tiny folk marching band that sings with the range of a church choir and the environmental reverence and abandon of a troupe of instrumentally-virtuosic Sierra Club representatives. Their tunes drip with lyrics about roots exploring the earth, about vast oceans and tides, about snails telling us humans to slow down. Moore writes about shaking off societal expectations and doing what’s right for the earth, for our souls, the same aesthetic reflected in the band’s instrumentation. “The songs in general, I guess, would be about that same kind of radical emotion, getting-to-the-root-of-things emotion,” he says. “I want to make sure when I write a song, make sure that the song stands out, and not try to cover it up with a bunch of effects. Just try to be very simple about it.”

Ultimately, the band left Burly Time to self-release the album. They met Phil Waldorf of Dead Oceans Records and secured a re-release for the record last week (June 17), complete with two bonus tracks, Secretly Canadian’s distribution channels and their first vinyl pressing. Now a whole planet of listeners have the opportunity to hold Hymns in their hands.