Tune-Yards & My Brightest Diamond at Variety Playhouse, Atlanta, May 19, 2018

We're a little late posting this, but last Saturday night we saw Tune-Yards perform at Variety Playhouse.  Bonus points: My Brightest Diamond opened.

My Brightest Diamond is singer Shara Worden (now Shara Nova).  She's a little hard to describe, harder still to classify.  We first heard her singing with post-rock chamber ensemble Clogs (The Creatures In The Garden Of Lady Walton) and with the orchestral composer Sarah Kirkland Snider. Based on that, we initially had her pegged as some sort of semi-classical chamber-music singer, but she later started to rock out and delivered powerhouse backing vocals for Sufjan Stevens and, most notably, as The Forest Queen in The Decemberists' The Hazards of Love.

The Forest Queen parts are, to us, among the very best highlights of The Hazards of Love, an album not without many high points.  Shara dominates the band, fittingly for the part, but we also have to give kudos to Atlanta singer Kelly Hogan, who delivered a more-than-credible rendition of The Forest Queen lines when she sang back up for The Decemberists at Variety Playhouse a few years ago, which turned out to be the highlight of that show.

Kelly Hogan, 1997

But see how easily we get distracted?  Our minds free-associate from Shara Worden to The Decemberists to shows we saw by The Decemberists to Kelly Hogan, but before we go any further let's snap back, if not to the here and now, at least to last Saturday night.

We also are aware that at this point, we're just name-dropping and haven't really described Shara's music, so here's a great La Blogotheque set by My Brightest Diamond that captures the many different styles and sense of performance that she displayed during her Saturday night set.  For us, the highlight below is her cover, starting at the 25:00-minute mark, of Peggy Lee's Fever, but the whole thing is great, and man, that lady can sing!  I would put her ability to blow the roof off a building using only her voice right up there with Florence Welch and Zola Jesus.

Speaking of powerful vocals, the headliner was Merrill Garbus, aka Tune-Yards.  We've been fans of Tune-Yards since Bird-Brains back in 2009, and she's rewarded our loyalty by constantly innovating and changing her sound, and Saturday night was certainly the loudest and most intense show we've heard from her yet.  Somewhere in the dense clusters of overdubbed loops were her signature ukulele strumming and quirky vocals, but she primarily was showcasing dense sonic textures bordering on shoegaze that are new to her repertoire.  

We've never seen her with the same combination of backing musicians twice.  While in the past she's featured saxophones and backup singers, last weekend she just had a bass player and a drummer, and the layers of harmony previously provided by the singers and horns were generated at her pedalboard.  

Here's a new song from a recent KCRW performance, in which she shows how deftly she can pivot from rock to neo-African polyrhythms to hip-hop and back again, all with the flick of a pedalboard switch. 

The set started with songs primarily from her new LP, I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life and eventually segued into some of the audience favorites (Water Cooler, Gangsta, Powa) from previous albums.

Her encore started with our personal favorite Tune-Yards song, Gangsta, from the 2011 album Whokill.

The encore closed with My Country from the same 2011 album, which opens with the patriotic "My country 'tis of thee, Sweet land of liberty" but given current events, the refrain from the song ("The worst thing about living a lie is just wondering when they'll find out") sounds eerily prophetic these days. 

In sum, a great show by two dynamic women.  We're so glad we went - je ne regrette rien.  We hope you have the time to enjoy some of the videos we included in an attempt to capture the evening better than our cell-phone cameras could.