Indies & Exposure: My Brightest Diamond

Monday, May 14, 2007

I'm trying to slowly gain ground on my I&E series by posting them a little earlier than the last week each time. This week my recommended band is My Brightest Diamond. The band is mainly one person, Shara Worden (pictured above), and they are signed to the indie label run by Sufjan Stevens, called Asthmatic Kitty Records. Like several other bands on Asthmatic Kitty, Shara Worden was a background musician in Sufjan Steven's band at some point. Now she's on to doing her own thing.

My Brightest Diamond sounds to me like a perfect mixture of PJ Harvey and Portishead. The dark moody guitar with these soft, breathy, Kate Bush-like vocals over top. Lyrically, the songs are thoughtful and even somewhat poetic, usually they tell a sort of dark or mysterious story, often with a transfixing imagery. They don't have that electronic feel that Portishead had, but the texture of the music is still surprisingly similar - as is the vocal style in places.

I came across MBD from several sources - probably the first of them was my friend Erik who was a post-doc here at UNL with me. We had strangely similar tastes in music and he is a huge Sufjan fan, so I'm sure he found MBD while digging around on the Asthmatic Kitty website. Even with Erik's head's up, though, I didn't seriously start listening to the band until we got the XM radio for Christmas, because they started playing some of the songs regularly on XMU and K and I both got sucked in a bit (I think my friend Karen also sent me some stuff in there at some point as well).

For those people who might be interested in the band's history, they used to go by the name Awry (see this link)and under that moniker the band looks like it was even more artsy. There are some links to their previous releases as Awry on that site, but I haven't really listened to them. The band also has their own website away from the label and that site has a lot more music available for download and a ton of other information, photos, video and whatever else.

Downloads and other junk:

From the album Workhorse:
Something of an End

From an AK sampler:
Riding Horses

There are also a bunch of radio performances and other sources of music to listen to that are available on the music section of the MBD website.

And of course there is always the band's myspace site.

The myspace site also has this photograph of Shara in a superhero costume complete with a cape and a sword, which cracked me up.

Labels: music

This entry was posted on Monday, May 14, 2007 at 4:51 PM. There are . If you want, you can leave your own response by clicking here. You may also send this post to a friend of yours via email, or bookmark it for yourself by using icons below;