Dark Dark Dark - Dark-hued chamber-pop

The ramshackle hippie-nerd crew that turned into a chamber orchestra. The ugly-duckling singer who turned into a swan. In just four years, the trajectory of Dark Dark Dark sketched out a stunning miniature American dream, once again revealing just how much richer the indie underground can be compared to what its most hyped phenomena might suggest.

They set out as six (later becoming a quintet) from Minneapolis, Minnesota, armed with cello, banjo, accordion, upright bass and piano. But they already had the secret to their fortune tucked away: the unmistakable voice of Nona Marie Invie, a singer anything but beholden to traditional notions of good singing, yet gifted with a piercing, aching delivery of the kind that strikes straight at the heart. A travelling troupe of sideshow freaks, thrown together in a ramshackle ensemble that might as well depict Victorian London—chimney sweeps and prostitutes—transplanted to a fishermen's village in overalls on the banks of the Mississippi; it wouldn't be surprising if they'd brought along a young, impressionable, still beardless Poe. The whole set-up, then, is decidedly dusty and hardly promises easy success, especially since it comes paired with a musical sensibility seemingly ill-suited to pop conventions, marrying the acoustic depths of the Midwest with New Orleans jazz echoes and Balkan folk languor (Kusturica and Bregovic would surely approve, as would the Beirut of “Gulag Orkestar“).

This is the Dark Dark Dark that took part in the bizarre environmental project “Swimming Cities Of The Switchback Sea”, curated by artist Swoon: a series of rafts/installations built from scrap materials, polystyrene and wood that in 2008 sailed down the Hudson River (between the cities of Troy and New York) and in 2009 also made stops on the Adriatic, from the coast of Slovenia all the way to the Venice Biennale.

For their debut album Snow Magic, not without a certain degree of self-indulgence, Nona Marie Invie has herself accompanied on an improvised raft of accordion, banjo and fiddle, in a lascivious staging that ranges from the decadent vaudeville of “That Light” to the gothic cacophony of the Transylvanian lament “Ashes”.

Invie is already a looming presence, with her towering, witchy vocals (though also pained and expressive, as on “Junk Bones” and “All The Things”) compared to the timid appearances of her bandmate LaCount. The album, however, clearly bears the mark of a work conceived to establish an identity, to introduce an eccentric (though perhaps not so eccentric in 2008, with Beirut, Sufjan Stevens, Andrew Bird and Arcade Fire all on the scene) and nomadic band, but one that is just as predictable in its choices (violin as the “mournful” counterpart, the solemn, nostalgic folklore of the accordion, the urban, cabaret-style vaudeville of the piano runs) and, in short, more concerned with projecting an image of itself than with building one through its songs.

This nomadic spirit – which would then actually play out in the band's life on the road – increasingly seeps into the music of Dark Dark Dark itself, on the approach to their following album Wild Go (just listen to the gypsy carousel of opener “In Your Dreams”), just as the band's self-deprecating humor – they chose their name as a caricature of the music they were making at the time – lightens the faint, delicate pathos of the songs on this record, released in Europe in 2011 through Melodic, after having come out in the United States back in 2010.

To be honest, judging from their music, Dark Dark Dark don't come across as such hopelessly dated hippies. Take a piano ballad like “Something For Myself” and you'll find all the ingredients needed to decode Wild Go: a classicism almost akin to the gravity of Agnes Obel and Anja Plaschg, broken up by the crystalline vocal drive of the singer and frontwoman, who lends the songs' swirling flights the vibrant romanticism of a Victoria LeBlanc, alongside the distinctive accordion accompaniment (never caricatured, in any case). The same recipe produces the lovely single “Daydreaming”, a magical play of reflections, a voluptuous emotional overload, able to make you resonate like a string in its quiet grandeur.

Elegant waltzes (“Say The Word” and above all the aching “Celebrate”, a Beirut-like idyll) paint a sorrowful carnival of ragamuffins and drifters, forever wandering on rafts and carts, while the frivolous “Right Path” tells, in the manner of Loch Lomond, a drunken and bitter parable. But there are also traces, in their chamber textures, of the Radiohead-like drive of Other Lives (“Heavy Heart”).

Wild Go, in short, has the physique du rôle of a pop record of real stature, built with elegance (the touching “Robert”) but also with that irony (Andrew Bird, anyone?) that so many other young songwriters, or bands in general, often lack. A precious, unique quality, to be guarded like a small treasure, like one's own soul.

Meanwhile the band also grew in a live dimension, supporting the intercontinental tours of The National and Low, and carving out small TV appearances, such as on the British show Live From Abbey Road. Further small confirmation of the band's growth comes from the EP included with this edition of Wild Go, titled Bright Bright Bright. Here too you can spot the seeds of Invie's authorial personality, still theatrical in the Morricone-esque trumpet accompaniment of “The Hand”, in the piano solo of “Wild Goose Chase”, an airy prelude to the band's masterpiece, which would arrive with their next full-length.

Most of the material on Who Needs Who (2012) was written by Invie in Minneapolis and later arranged by the band on tour and in New Orleans, in recording sessions featuring sound engineer Tom Herbers. And the music of Dark Dark Dark now really does seem like a direct expression of Invie herself, the instruments practically an extension of her presence. Between piano runs that recall the “propulsive” Legrand of “Teen Dream” (“Tell Me”) and gypsy flourishes in the style of Regina Spektor (“Without You”), the Minneapolis band deliver, on this third record, their most mature work yet. Even more fervent and vibrant are the American singer's performances, who, while not possessing the vocal range of the aforementioned peers, surpasses them in expressive gifts, in pure charisma. It seems no accident to read an interview of hers for Yale's feminist magazine, already a mature artist facing her own self from ten years earlier, the girl with the tape recorder on the other side of the table.

Judging by the invective of "Who Needs Who" (“I had/ the memory of trust/ I swallow it hole/ And from the mouth of you/ A constant cue/ Who needs who?”), a bit of that riot grrl spirit still survives in Nona Marie, even alongside her style as a mournful blues-star, and even within her increasingly classical piano style, which essentially leans toward the solemn flourishes of early Other Lives.

One of the heroines invoked is Patsy Cline, in what is perhaps the album's most "Closing Time"-like track, which, like much of the record, displays this nocturnal, enchanting atmosphere: in the funereal slow-burn of "Hear Me", pierced by the light of the trumpet; in the measured progressions of "How It Went Down", one of the most "plastic" tracks in expressing the state of mind in which the album was written — an analysis perhaps spare, perhaps still in fieri, of a period of great change in her own life. One of these changes is without doubt the end of the romantic relationship between Invie and the band's other guiding spirit, Marshall LaCount, which also led to a brief hiatus for the group, occurring between 2011 and 2012. Nona Marie aptly sums up, in this sense, the spirit in which she wrote the songs on "Who Needs Who": "A lot of these songs are about understanding and accepting the nuances of my emotions. The obvious parts and the dark ones. There are moments when it's right to stop fantasizing and look the truth of what's happening right in the face".

This precise moment, just described, the one that perhaps marks the definitive passage from youth into full maturity, might not meet the expectations of those who want artistic expression to always stay "young" — a surge of inexperience and faith, not an after-the-fact analysis. In this "Who Needs Who", within its pianistic frescoes, which lull with their own circularity only to suddenly surge upward, or to give way to a splash of rhythmic colour, to a distant hint of trumpet ("The Great Mistake"), what instead comes fully into focus is the great epiphany of a first, true reckoning with the past.

In short, calling this latest Dark Dark Dark record their "maturity album" would almost seem like a play on words, given that maturity is precisely its central theme. The instrumental backdrop, both absorbed and emotional, does nothing but reinforce this underlying concept of coming to terms with one's own aspirations, toward oneself and toward others. Perhaps the saddest and happiest moment in a person's life.

Now settled as a quintet — Nona Marie Invie (piano, accordion, vocals), Marshall LaCount (banjo, clarinet, vocals), Walter McClements (trumpet, accordion), Adam Wozniak (bass), Mark Trecka (drums) — the Minneapolis band is now called upon to confirm its growth and to withstand the rift in the private lives of its two guiding spirits (Invie/LaCount). In the meantime, though, we can say with certainty that a star has been born in the indie galaxy, as dark in name as it is luminous in its artistic ascent. Yet another American miracle.

Before the reappearance of Nona Marie Invie's voice on the new National album, on which she appears after having bewitched the Chicago band as well, the band returned with a short release put out for Record Store Day 2013.

Entirely in keeping with the preceding Who Needs Who, What I Needed features a sweetly building confession/invective like "Love Lies" and a retro-pop number full of dreamy sixties suggestions like the title track as its standout tracks.

Despite a more sketch-like "I Collect Things", conceived as a gently lyrical closer, this is a genuinely good release — if only the ending didn't fall instead into the hands of an avoidable, baffling house remix of "How It Went Down" (sic). But watch out, because whatever you won't forgive Nona Marie for, she'll throw right back down your throat with a clipped phrase and a stare straight into your eyes.

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