Antiques Roadshow: The Low Anthem

| Print Post This | Like (2) | Comments (2)

THE LOW ANTHEM is perhaps the only band in the world to work a tour around collecting pump organs.

"We collect these old bellows-powered organs," singer Ben Knox Miller said. "Since [finding a World War I pump organ on eBay] we've become quite obsessed with these instruments. We're on eBay and Craigslist in every city that we go to, and we usually come home with a couple of new items. We've even been known to re-route tours to find particularly rare pump organs."

The instrument, popular in the 19th century, is also known as a reed organ because it generates sound using free metal reeds. Although it looks a bit like a small piano, it sounds more like an accordion.

"They make such beautiful sounds if you go and tune the reeds back up and fix the bellows," he said. "They make this beautiful woody-reed tone. It's basically like a giant harmonica in a wood box. It buzzes. They'll never be able to make a midi patch sound nearly as good as these things because there's actually an element of physicality that creates unpredictable sounds and phrasings."

Pump organs (currently four of them) only make up a small portion of the Low Anthem's touring army of vintage instruments — you'll also see vintage guitars (a 1963 Gibson B-15 and a classical guitar from Amsterdam built in 1860), horns, a German upright bass and a mess of harmonicas.

The old-time instrumentation begets the group's old-time sound: a folksy aesthetic steeped in all things Americana. Maybe it shouldn't be surprising: The band did form — and is still based — in Providence, R.I., one of the United States' first cities, and now a thriving arts community.

"Providence has a great art scene," he said. "To be surrounded by creative people and other great musicians — that's certainly good. ... Everyone's always making something themselves. There's a nice D.I.Y. aspect to the city as a whole."

Principals Miller and Jeff Prystowsky met in Providence while attending Brown University, and, along with former member Dan Lefkowitz, started the Low Anthem in 2006. Lefkowitz left less than a year in (though he recently joined the band on a European tour) and the band added fellow Brown alum Jocie Adams in 2007. All three current members are multi-instrumentalists, but Miller handles singing, Prystowsky primarily plays bass and Adams is fluent in clarinet.

That's the line-up you'll see when the group opens for Blind Pilot at the Black Cat on Nov. 11, but not when the band returns to Washington on Dec. 1 to open for Josh Ritter at the 9:30 Club.

"I think this is probably the last tour we'll do as a trio actually," Miller said. "We're thinking on bringing on a fourth multi-instrumentalist."

But Miller wouldn't reveal who it would be — "You'll find out soon enough," he said. But will the change be enough to lure local fans twice in less than a month?

"It'll definitely be different," Miller said of the two shows. "We're not the kind of band that plays the same set every night, we pick different songs and different arrangements."

The band is touring in support of its latest record, "Oh My God, Charlie Darwin," originally released last September, then re-configured and re-released on Nonesuch Records in June. On it, the group unintentionally crafted a disc thematically linked to the "On The Origin of Species" author.

"We came up with [the title] sort of as a joke," Miller recalled. "We were walking around the zoo one day and it occurred to us, 'Oh, how funny would that be? But wait, it's actually good too — maybe we should do that?' Ever since the words were spoken out loud it became this hub, and you could see how it had a certain gravity on all the songs."

On the record, Miller's singing takes on a new property, a second distinctive voice. The gruff, throaty, Tom Waits-inspired growl contrasts his softer, more delicate, folksy timbre.

"I guess that's just one of the ways that I sing," he said. "It's not a calculated decision; we tried the songs every different way we could. ... The same way you play electric guitar or acoustic guitar, you can sing and holler, or you can whisper."

Unsurprisingly, the snarl fits best on "Home I'll Never Be," a song by beat writer Jack Kerouac. Waits covered the tune on his album "Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards."

"That beautiful piano ballad, which sounds like [Waits] just put a tape recorder on top of the piano, we heard that and we were just sort of taken aback by that recording," Miller said. "We went backward and investigated where that song had come from. ... We took to playing it live on a whim and it was so much fun to play live. The recording actually isn't a recording we tried to put on the record. It was from a session we did in pre-production, it's like a one-take thing, but everyone was excited about it. We found we weren't quite able to reproduce that energy — even if we tried a more polished version — so we went with that one."

Despite the band's expansive touring, the Low Anthem plans to return to the studio in December to begin work on a new album — an effort that's already branching out in new creative directions.

"I think what we seem to have is sets of songs that are little mini-families within this record," Miller said. "I'm not sure exactly how it will play out, whether in the end they'll be cohesive enough to be mixed together in the proper sequence on one disc, or whether they'll have to be separated into a couple of different bodies or sections. Songs seem to be veering into camps more rapidly then we'd like them to."

» Black Cat, 1811 14th St. NW; with Blind Pilot, Mimicking Birds, Wed., Nov. 11, 8 p.m., $15; 202-667-4490. (U St.-Cardozo)
» 9:30 Club, 815 V St. NW; with Josh Ritter, The Life & Times, Tue., Dec. 1, 7 p.m., $20; 202-265-0930, 930.com. (U St.-Cardozo)

Photo courtesy Johanna Neufeld