Samantha Crain and her band, the Midnight Shivers, will release a full-length album, Songs in the Night, in April. The night before, Ms. Crain said, we played in a really small college town, so they laughed at everything we said. Then, as if succumbing to the inevitable, she proclaimed, This songs about a preacher who drowns a man that hes baptizing. Again, not a single laugh.
That song, The River, opened The Confiscation: A Musical Novella by Samantha Crain, an EP released on Ramseur last year, and revealed Ms. Crain as a promising young storyteller with fealty to ragged, country-driven indie-pop and an alluring dark streak.
In April the band will release its impressive full-length debut album, Songs in the Night, which vividly eclipses the EP. Theres a hushed, humid beauty to the album that may be difficult to recapture live, except in the most desolate and dank spaces.
At Southpaw the groups half-hour set didnt always get the best of the chatty crowd at the closing-night party for the 2009 Native American Film & Video Festival. (Ms. Crain is of Choctaw origin.) Still, the group flaunted effortless melodies. Rising Sun, which opens Songs in the Night, is as elegant a pop song as any this year, and deserves a fate better, if not more profitable, than a placement on an ABC prime-time drama, which is where it may well end up.
I will give in to the dark clouds, Ms. Crain whispered, and I will sing with the fog in my throat.
When focused, Ms. Crain with turquoise tights screaming out from between a beige print dress and red cowboy boots was captivating. Her pleading, slightly distant intonation recalled early-1990s Britpop, an accent atop a voice that traverses the space between Gillian Welch and Regina Spektor. And when Ms. Crain pushes herself, that voice arcs and dips and punches like Siouxsie Siouxs.
