For nearly 15 years, Phoenicia’s Flying Cat Music has been the region’s premiere presenter of an international selection of folk, bluegrass, and uncategorizable acoustic music. Their boutique listening room series has attracted all kinds of outsize names and reputations into small spaces, mostly due to the heightened quality of the evenings themselves and ticket prices that should leave a few other venues I am thinking of somewhat ashamed. Flying Cat founders Janet Klugiewicz and Tommy Rinaldo are utterly non-dogmatic in their definition of folk, and no curveball is too far-out for the audience they have conditioned in the high Catskills. This was good news for the young (ish) Burlington, Vermont, progressive folk duo Cricket Blue, whom Flying Cat presented for the second time on August 12 at the Phoenicia United Methodist Church.
When Cricket Blue takes the stage, they present as a fairly ordinary indie folk project of their era and in their school. Their manner is mild, their dress tidy and modest. Their stage banter—voluminous for reasons to be discussed below—is familiar and casual, addressed as much to each other as to the audience, cultivating that “welcome to my bedroom; would you like to see something I made?” intimacy that is the shared oxygen of indie whisper folk. They are not shy but they are world-record-setting polite on stage, accommodating, on the verge of apologetic. Why?
Because they are about to ask a lot, an awful lot, from their audiences, and they know it.
While other folk artists often graft or slather baroque arrangement details atop their fundamentally standard folk songs, Cricket Blue are complex from the core on out, fancy from go. This is chamber folk with clean fingernails and a groomed, bottomless musicality. The intelligence and sophistication is matched on all levels of their craft: a harmonic richness and contrapuntal freedom in the compositions that belong to no single tradition; lyrics of hand-carved poetic glass and exacting narrative development, situated—finessed, without a single misfit phrase—in long and eventful song structures that employ the thematic and formal techniques of classical music. And they perform it in a way that is unforced, graceful, living the meanings of their tunes and seemingly untaxed by the astonishing difficulty of what they are actually writing, playing, and singing.
When, early in her career, Judy Collins wanted to present folk as an elegant and high concert hall form, she had access to the great orchestrators of her day (refugees from the financially and emotionally unrewarding currents of 20th century classical) to frame her soaring voice amidst Viennese ornament. Cricket Blue, on the other hand, does the posh thing on their own entirely indie terms. It’s the high road but also a dirt road. And they nail it above reproach.
Between Taylor Smith and Laura Heaberlin, one can only guess who wrote what based on who delivers the pre-song precis and advance discussion. Yes, they freely violate the common songwriter code against explaining your song. They explain at length. They isolate individual lines and images for closer analysis. I think the audience—even those who would normally be put off by such self-explication—comes to appreciate the generous (and super smart, super sweet) verbosity because these dense, beautiful songs are more approachable with a map in hand. Also Taylor and Laura spend a lot of time changing tunings between songs. Preparatory talk is preferable to dead air.
They are both exceptional guitarists, playing nearly opposite sounding and complementary Taylor acoustics. Smith plays like I would if I were a fair bit better at acoustic: bright, articulate, linear as he passes through chords and counterpoint, a little percussive in his weavings, coming as close to “lead guitar” as the band ever gets. Laura Heaberlin is something else entirely. She plays a larger and deeper bodied Taylor with strings (I presume) left on to go dead by design. In this dark, round tone (not a sound ever associated with the brassy Taylor brand), she routinely grabs ridiculous five-fret chord voicings that make the players in the audience wince in admiration and feel inferior. She finger picks through baroque bass lines and swinging arpeggios, the lithe and unfaltering groove engine of this impossibly fine, effortlessly executed music.
The band is blessed with one really good singer (Taylor) and one stone cold virtuoso (Laura, obv.). And they connect organically at all times as if they were old hats at playing the late quartets of Beethoven, every swell, every rubato, every sudden change, and all of the finely plotted musical and lyrical arcs of their songs performed as if by one swaying body with four hands and two tongues.
They channel and reference certain styles to be sure: early and renaissance music; hymns and New England folk; some of the detached harmony of Simon and Garfunkel and the irresolute chordal colors of Nick Drake; a lightly macabre, Gorey-esque humor that might position them near The Tiger Lillies and the cult of Kurt Weil; strains of the classical art songs of Purcell, Schubert, and Britten; and perhaps they love them some Elliott Smith as well—but all of that is non-binding and unstylized. Theirs is a unique, achieved compositional voice that will madden publicists with its namelessness from here on out.
Again and again Cricket Blue find themselves paired with other acts that seem kindred on the surface: new folk, parlor folk freed from the old tradition’s stock personae and narratives. It is typified by the presumption of personal candor, anti-machismo, the new honesty and vulnerability. But most of the bands they play with, and often open for, share to some extent in the “three chords and the truth” universalism of the American folk idiom, the creed of Woody and Pete. It’s what makes folk folk: thou shalt write no song that your fans can’t play around a campfire, should you be so lucky. When Cricket Blue steps up to the mic with their 27 chords, four meter changes, three modulations, and can we ever really say what’s true?” aesthetic, the campfire shivers, and I am not sure I’d want to be either band on that bill.
They will be called too smart, too clever for their own good. It will be said that they can’t see the forest (big emotional truths in common musical forms) for the trees (density, complexity, literary-ness, unchecked imagination). To be fair, all of those criticisms might well apply to an inferior version of Cricket Blue. Armed with music theory, great instrumental and vocal fluency, and what seem like pretty expensive liberal arts educations, they tread a fine line with all that cleverness and invention, commercially at least. I wonder if they sometimes even reprimand themselves for their inability or disinclination to settle down to the common language of their chosen idiom.
But no. All that cleverness and invention is borne out in the songs—necessary, earned. They hold up at a distance and up close. They have to be this way and no other. And they sound amazing. So it is down to you. If your world of taste, reader, is big enough to allow for genuinely elevated folk art without subtracting political points for its ambition, sophistication, and highbrow challenge, here is some of the best I have ever, ever heard.
If you’re still with me and your interest is piqued, start where I did: driving with a friend one night and chancing upon what is probably Cricket Blue’s hit song, their stunner among stunners, “Alicia from the Store,” on a college radio station. My friend observed a change come over me: shock and delight that this kind of thing is actually out there.
Why, here it is now: cricketblue.bandcamp.com/album/serotinalia
Meanwhile, Flying Cat’s season continues with numerous genuine highlights. The luminous, lush Scottish five-piece Heron Blue comes to the First Methodist Church on September 2. The L.A. Music Critic Award-winning singer-songwriter Alice Wallace is here on September 16. The critically acclaimed Detroit-based songwriter Kora Feder appears on October 7. W.E.B. Du Bois Legacy Award-winner Reggie Harris performs on October 28.
A Hudson Valley institution, the psychedelic confusionists of the Slambovian Circus of Dreams perform an unplugged set on November 11. Celebrated by NPR tastemaker Bob Boilen, the folk duo The Sea The Sea performs on November 25. The Flying Cat Music season concludes on December 16 with some internationally-recognized rising stars of the Celtic music world, the Nova Scotian sister act Cassie and Maggie.
For tickets and more information on Flying Cat Music, visit flyingcatmusic.org.
For more on Cricket Blue, visit cricketbluemusic.com or check out youtube.com/watch?v=XYhc4UGy3y4 for a live performance.
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