Paradise Perverted

JOANNA NEWSOM, The Milk-Eyed Mender (Drag City) She’s a singing harp player originally from Nevada City, now based in San Francisco. Simply stated, she’s invented a world of mesmerizing, way alternative lullabies, tiny-voiced like a 100-year-old woman in the body of a little girl. Her harp playing must be based in Appalachian strains, but she’ll splinter the rhythms, the chords and their order can be heart-wrenching but unsettling, and her harp fingering is more like the plucking of African instruments such as the kora, though to my ear she never blandly demonstrates world music “influences.” Apparently Newsom grew up as a neighbor of Terry Riley, and knows about Pauline Oliveros, and that respect for spacious minimalist means shows in these magical vignettes. And so smart: She already knows that if she’s not perverting the American folk music tradition, she’s just not doing her job. (She’ll be playing and singing at the Alterknit on Saturday, April 3. Drag yourself down there to lift yourself up.)

BOHREN & DER CLUB OF GORE, Black Earth (Ipecac) A bit like being wrapped in a damp wool blanket on an urban winter night, or, if you scored some change, huddled over the blue-lit bar, musing alone. Buncha Germans putting the gloomy, noirish twist on spacious acoustic jazz ruminations; subject matter: “Constant Fear,” “Skeletal Remains,” “The Art of Coffins.” Smoky sax, brush drums and double-bass place it in ostensible jazz, yet the keyboardist supplies not mere cool chordal comps but dolorous, dank Mellotron to plunge the Everyman’s life into something far more drippingly morose and unto the overtly sinisterrrrrrr . . . “Jazz” becomes the ideal new language to image impending doom, or at least our love of mystery; your reference here might be Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks scores. Hey, fella: If you turn from the bar and look closely, in the corner you’ll see hollow-eyed Death nursing his tea. He slowly raises his head and smiles. At you.