Power und Beauty: The Gnome E.P.

Free Release Friday
Best New Music.
Power und Beauty: The Gnome E.P.
2010, Peppermill Records

This album is available as a free download here.

The netlabel world is typically a world of ambient electronica experimentalism.  This is not a bad thing, but finding a brilliant little exhuberant acoustic-based E.P. like Power und Beauty’s The Gnome E.P., was a tremendous surprise for me.

Power und Beauty is a four-piece female band from Spokane, Washington.  The band makes four-part choral folk songs that are partly beautiful and partly unsettling.  One can easily recall Pavement and Fleet Foxes while listening to Power und Beauty’s four tracks on this E.P., yet the band has the ability to never feel derivative.

The band makes a special effort to create arrangements that are familiar and foreign, which plays well to the unsettling vibe on the record.  This reveals itself immediately in “Beggars and Felons,” the E.P.’s opening track.  Apart from the subject matter, the band introduces their music with an accordion waltz, hardly an instantly familiar song form for contemporary indie rock. 

Pair Power und Beauty’s grade school choir treatments with their unfamiliar song forms and you have the equation of a band that is likeably off-kilter.  You see this in the E.P.’s next two tracks, “Lavender” and “Peaches.”  Rather abruptly, the E.P. closes with the acoustic “The Author of Spring.” The choral arrangements are brilliant here, on par with anything that Fleet Foxes is doing, and it leaves the E.P. with a haunted feeling.

Power und Beauty are poised to make a remarkable statement to the folk community.  There is a tremendous gap between acoustic innovation and folk song forms that Fleet Foxes have only scratched in their self-titled debut for Sub Pop.  Pairing these lo-fi treatments to non-standard folk forms is truly a promising step in the right direction, even if it is a bit unsettling.

Cover art and Mp3s via Peppermill Records.