Darlingside
Lizzie No
Tuesday 23rd July, 7.30pm
Tickets are £20 (+ b/f) in advance (more on the door) and available from See Tickets.

*This is a seated show with all seating unreserved*

If Darlingside’s first album, Birds Say (2015), focused on the past through nostalgia, and their second, Extralife (2018), contemplated uncertain futures, Fish Pond Fish stands firmly in the present, looking at what’s here, now. Don Mitchell (guitar, banjo), Auyon Mukharji (violin, mandolin), and Harris Paseltiner (cello, guitar) have created a natural history in song—taking us into gardens, almond groves, orchard rows, down to the ocean floor and under stars.

The band has long been praised for their harmonies and intelligent songwriting, described by NPR as “exquisitely-arranged, literary-minded, baroque folk-pop,” and their dynamic presence (crowded tightly together onstage) have made them a live-performance favorite. But this album showcases their broader storytelling abilities: nature is a looking glass, the songs suggest, with tracks like Ocean Bed, Green + Evergreen, Mountain + Sea, and Crystal Caving making metaphors of their titles. An experience of nature is an experience of self; an experience of self is one of natural change cut and complemented by stasis.

The band started studio recording Fish Pond Fish in late 2019, when they moved into Tarquin Studios—the residential studio of Grammy Award-winning producer Peter Katis (Interpol, The National). Living and working together brought them to their very early years under one roof in Hadley, Massachusetts, which had seeded the origins of their intimate collaboration. At Katis’s suggestion, many components of the initial demos were preserved as layers in the produced tracks to retain the spirit of the initial recordings, resulting in a collection of songs that is simultaneously the most bedroom-tracked and production-heavy full-length album that the band has yet released.

Lizzie No

Let’s start with this: genre is a construct.

To categorize artists might make it easier to organize record stores and playlists but there’s no one term that could define any artist, least of all one like Lizzie No(she/her/they/them).

You could say that Lizze No makes “Americana” music, in that her work pulls from the rhythms and traditions of Blues, Folk, and Country —not unlike the artists to whom she’s most often compared: Allison Russell, Rhiannon Giddens and Adia Victoria —but her collaborations with Brian Dunne, Pom Pom Squad and Domino Kirke display an undeniable Indie influence that allows No to move frequently and seamlessly between overlapping musical circles.

You could say that Lizzie No writes “protest” songs, in that as aQueer, Black woman, herentire existence is a living, breathing, singing protest against a genre and a country that, on their best days, are reluctant to reckon with the very foundations upon which they were built. The erasure of Black artists is central to the myth of country music —what it means, what it stands for, where it comes from —and so simply by standing on stage and singing, whether it be in theaters across the country with the Black Opry, or at Queer Line Dancing nights with the Lavender Country tour, Lizzie No is staging a kind of protest.

After a dizzying five-year span that saw the release of two stunning, eclectic albums (Hard Wonand Vanity, which drew praise from the likes of Billboardand Rolling Stone) —followed by appearances at AmericanaFest, the Newport Folk Festival, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, and SXSW, and tours with Iron &Wine, Son Little, and Adia Victoria —Lizzie No found themselvesat the forefront of a new vanguard of genre-defying artists. Theirnew album, Halfsies (Thirty Tigers / Miss Freedomland), finds No situated among theirpeers while still searching for freedom —freedom from the constraints of categorization, sure, but more importantly, freedom from the depths of theirown personal despair and from an increasinglyviolent and nightmarish American cultural and political landscape.

Darlingside
Lizzie No
Tuesday 23rd July, 7.30pm
Tickets are £20 (+ b/f) in advance (more on the door) and available from See Tickets.