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Join us as this American indie rock musicians brings her cosmic, finely detailed and stirringly beautiful songs to The Word Barn Meadow.
Special guest Hello Shark.
ABOUT ALLEGRA KRIEGER
“On the ground level of an apartment building in Manhattan’s Chinatown, multiple lithium batteries combusted in an e-bike shop. It was just after midnight when songwriter Allegra Krieger awoke to a banging on her door. She made it out, fleeing down eight flights of stairs and a “wall of grey smoke,” which she recalls in her song, “One or the Other.” Throughout the song, Krieger cradles gratitude and conjures a universe in which she responded differently to the fire. Ultimately, she leaves us with two questions: “What do we know about living? What do we know about dying?”
It was in the months following the fire that Krieger wrote much of Art of the Unseen Infinity Machine, her second full-length album with Double Double Whammy, a collection of 12 songs that pick at the fragile membrane between life and death.
Krieger’s previous album, I Keep My Feet on the Fragile Plane, hewed more closely to the domestic spaces of city and mind. Rolling Stone regarded the album as “ten songs of heady philosophical meanderings packed with emotional dynamite,” and likened her “finely phrased lyrics” to those of “Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, [and] David Berman.” Krieger’s existential meditations remain on Art of the Unseen Infinity Machine, however her meandering melodies have taken on a stronger sense of direction. She narrates candidly and assertively; the full-band arrangements never overpower, only offer a robust platform on which Krieger’s voice reaches new heights.
The full band brings a heightened sense of drama to the album’s arrangements, which contrasts the quieter approach of Krieger’s previous LP. There are noisy interludes, jazz-inflected discursions, impactful stops and starts, and occasional spaces for Krieger to stretch out her impressive vocal range (most prominently at the dazzling climax of album stand out “Came”).
Lead single “Never Arriving,” from which the album’s title is derived, is thrilling in its compactness. Alluding to biology, sex and death in a series of sharp phrases, the song manages to address a whole worldview in a few short lines.
“Into Eternity” introduces a new stylistic wrinkle, taking on a sprechgesang narration over an uneasy guitar motif. In a stream of consciousness delivery, Krieger presents a series of seemingly disparate vignettes - the chaos of a New York street, a memory of an interaction with a grieving ex-boyfriend, a homeless woman, a butterfly - and pulls at the common threads that connect them. Like much of the album, the song is invested in transfiguring the commonplace; examining events big and small and in doing so trying to take hold of their significance.
In Art of the Unseen Infinity Machine, Krieger invites us to a place where transfiguration is not only possible but actively happening. From this place, the beautiful and the banal and the terrible are all laid out before us. And Krieger asks us not to look away. Instead, she invites us to stare down the beautiful and terrible in the world, and to realize that sometimes the only way out is through.”
ABOUT HELLO SHARK
Hello Shark is the recording project of songwriter Lincoln Halloran. Beginning in Vermont in 2006, Hello Shark's music is characterized most by the honest and melancholy nature of Halloran's writing paired with a knack for melody and crushing vocal delivery.
Though Lincoln Halloran grew up on the coast of rural Massachusetts, he came of age surrounded by the music that would have a profound impact both on his own future work. Thanks to Jason Anderson – drummer for The Microphones and an artist with multiple releases on Olympia Washington's K Records – countless bands came through the small town, from Adrian Orange (Thanksgiving) and Jana Hunter, to Viking Moses and Mirah. Lincoln threw himself into the scene, going to every show and becoming hooked on the burgeoning neo-folk movement, soon realising that all he wanted to do was write songs and play in the intimate living rooms he so often found himself in.
After relocating to Vermont for a “short-lived college career”, Lincoln spent the winter there buried under snow, and with nowhere else to go and nothing else to do, he began recording songs in the communal house he lived in, passing the season singing folk songs that would be his first recordings. With a new-found confidence, Lincoln released a couple of DIY collections in 2006 before he started performing as Hello Shark in 2007, backed by a revolving cast of friends, like a folksy family band that only knew half the songs.
Now settled as a three-piece alongside Sean Hood (bass) Alex Decato (drums) – though still backed by a group of additional musicians who helped flesh out the recordings - the first ‘proper’ Hello Shark album, Break Arms, was released in 2011 via the small but excellent indie label burst & bloom records, who also released early work from the likes of Friendship and Bellows.