“Could we get that turned down a little?” Sarah Holbrook asked, shielding her forehead with an open palm as a yellow-green light fell onto them. Tech guru Garret Kuppelmeyer fiddled with the controls from the back of the bar, working methodically as chatter bubbled up from the front of the house and flowed through the crowd. The lights fell to a cool blue.
Lucy Gellman Photo
“Whew! Much better,” she said. “So we were on this trip to Tennessee, before we lived there, and there were these clear glass mason jars of what turned out to be moonshine. Well…we don’t have that in Fort Collins. So we drank it and then … woke up the next day and wrote this song.”
The crowd laughed. One great, cackling giggle rose up from a cluster of tables at the front. And with that, SHEL — Sarah, Hannah, Eva and Liza Holbrook — were off again, their climbing voices conjuring an image of a mythic “Moonshine Hill” as the women leaned in to the music, dancing frenetically around the stage.
SHEL’s folk fantasy, mandolin odyssey, and percussive wet dream of a performance unraveled this past Wednesday at Cafe 9, where the group and opener Olive Tiger kept a packed house going through the wee hours of the morning. Promising the audience “daring, fanciful vocal arrangements,” SHEL tickled and thrilled for nearly two hours, importing an entirely new sound for spring into the Elm City. So did Tiger, whose obsessive vocal layerings and lilting but muscled voice recall Florence Welch, Fiona Apple, Andrew Bird, and Iron & Wine.
Olive Tiger.
One listen, and you figure out why real fast. SHEL is musically bulletproof. Between the members’ four instruments and four voices, the nuanced, multinational histories of folk and rock were spun into silken, unassailable rhythms and sharp, airtight lyrics. The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Harry Nilsson, Be Good Tanyas, and Vashti Bunyan flirted and found common ground as Eva and Sarah approached the mic in songs like “Lost at Sea,” where an ethereal refrain merges with clean musical breaks. The group’s adaptation of “The Battle of Evermore” flickered with the lineage of hearty drinking songs and an earthy, Celtic heart-cum-drumbeat.
They are also incredibly tight. Like, master-knit, circle-stitch, crawl-into-that-blanket-of-a-voice tight, and deeply polished without so much as a whiff of pretension. In the middle of totally charming banter — the sisters’ airport run-in with Robert Plant; the trials and tribulations of their self-shot videos, which Sarah oversees; what happens when one of them has too much moonshine, the possible creation of a #CTclaps hashtag — the four walked and wound around the stage, their own laughter wrapping each other and members of the audience who ventured close enough. It extended to their performance, an electrifying tour de force where they stomped and strutted to the music, showcasing beat-boxing skills, vocal nuance and instrumental precision with each number.
They are also the kind of band that reminds you why it’s important to watch music live once in a while. They themselves, perhaps, said it best with no words at all, posting a picture of a bloodied pick and fingertips to their Twitter page after the show.
”No pain no gain,” it read. “Coming for you tonight, NYC!”
To find out more about events at Cafe Nine, visit their website.
