By Jennifer Kelly

A plunge into a deep blue pool. That’s what Grand Archives’ vast harmonic landscapes remind me of, a sudden shock of cool and still, a beautiful, welcome pause in the sweaty day-to-day. So, how appropriate that they arrive in Western Massachusetts on the hottest night of the summer so far, a baking, withering heat that lingers in the sidewalks long after the sun has faded.

Grand Archives brings along Sera Cahoone, whose bone-dry, unsentimental country songs are like looking truth straight in the face without blinking. She’s got long connections with Grand Archives’ Mat Brooke, starting with Carissa’s Wierd, the Seattle indie-pop band that gave both of them their start. Grand Archives played their very first show (then just Archives, not yet Grand) in support of Cahoone, a night that got them signed to Sub Pop. Cahoone sings on two songs from the band’s self-titled album. They go way back, far enough back that members of Grand Archives casually step up to the mic near her set’s close to harmonize on the choruses of “Delta Dawn.” They’re almost family. They’re a long way from home. And they’re much hotter than they’re used to being.

But before all this Seattle celebration starts, there’s a local woman on the bill, a woman named Ella Longpre, who sits quietly on a folding chair, singing strong bitter songs over acoustic guitar. She’s wearing glasses, modestly dressed in a black tee-shirt and jeans, so it takes a while for the sensuality of her voice to sink in, her big, rich vibrato busting out of the lower registers. She sounds a little like Tracy Chapman, rattling off strings of intricate imagery, then cresting into big powerful refrains. She has a way, too, of slipping into wordless refrains, the ba-da-das and hums casual, as if she were singing to herself in some private place, just for the love of it. It’s all pretty folky until, right at the end, Longpre sings a song called “Sweet Christine,” which is emphatic and rhythmic and could well be a rocker with the right band. (It damned near is one even without.) She sounds, for a minute or two, like PJ Harvey.

Sera Cahoone is next, a tall, thin, intense-looking type with straight black hair and skinny black jeans. A drummer first – she started at age 11 – she has lately turned her attention to the guitar-strumming, soul-baring styles of traditional country, earning comparisons to Patsy Cline and Neko Case. She plays much of her latest album Only As the Day Is Long this evening, supported by nearly everyone who appeared on the record: Jeff Fielder on banjo and guitar, Jason Kardong on lap steel, Jonas Haskins on bass and Jason Merculief on drums. (The violin and cello players did not make the trip.)

As a result, the sound is dense and sensual, the percussive plunk of banjo and snare brushes slicked over with the sustained twang of pedal steel, the slow-marching ballads paced by thundering kick drum. Cahoone’s voice is, of course, the main element, swelling from a slurred, other-side-of-the-bed-in-the-morning whisper to a full-throated wail. She looks, and sounds, strong and confident, counting off the fours to start a song, locked into jams with her guitar and bass player. And this is maybe important, because the songs are all about hidden strengths and perseverance, nothing rose-colored about them. The signature song, “Only as the Day Is Long,” rides a rock solid beat, a steady plunk of banjo rhythms, as Cahoone murmurs and croons and plays the harmonica strapped to her neck. The song bursts into mournful flower, then closes all the way up at the end, as Cahoone whispers, “Nothing is the way I want it/All this will pass/Because it’s only as the day is long,”

Later, the sound turns harder and desolate in “The Colder the Air,” Fielder switching to electric, Merculief hitting slow and unrelentingly on the twos and fours. Cahoone voice turns more towards the blues, less towards the pure country here, as she wails out lines like “Should I try/It’s almost beyond me now” and “Hear that sound? It’s only inside my head.” This is hard-bitten, face-the-truth music, where the world is faced down in all its harsh banality and called out for unnecessary cruelty.

Not that Cahoone isn’t capable of having fun now and then. Her set closer, which she introduces as “an old Tanya Tucker song,” turns out to be “Delta Dawn,” the song that Helen Reddy turned into 1970s radio fodder. She and her band, augmented by two Grand Archivists, stand three to a mic, brandishing tambourines and singing in close harmony. Cahoone is grinning through the whole thing. So is the audience.

Grand Archives, a band with its own taste in goofy 1970s covers (more about that later), is next. Mat Brooke nods to his keyboard/guitar player Ron Lewis, and they are off and whistling. The first song is “Miniature Birds”, its high sweet harmonies faintly reminiscent of “Sister Golden Hair”-era America. The harmonies are one of the distinguishing things about Grand Archives, putting them in a club with other heavily hyped bands of 2008, such as Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver. Yet these are not the ghostly, midnight mass harmonies that Justin Vernon favors, nor the aching disembodied ones of Fleet Foxes. No, they are rooted in pop, right down to the ground, and if they sometimes remind you of terrible bands like America, the Bee Gees and Seals & Crofts, they are not, themselves, in any way terrible. In fact, it is quite a lovely thing to hear their voices soar in complicated chordal patterns, sometimes sliding off the top note all together, still in harmony, as they fall down the scale.

The set relies heavily on Grand Archives first, and to date only, album. It winds through the brief, lovely “Orange Juice,” one guitar played so far up on the bridge that it sounds like a mandolin, and the longer, grander “Swan Matches” with its crashing indie guitars and dizzying vocal counterparts. There’s a cover of Sam Cooke’s “Saturday Night” (you might know the Cat Stevens cover – clearly Grand Archives did.) and two new songs. The first one has a chorus of “Why oh Why”, the final “why” fluttering over a series of its ending note like a sparrow circling a roosting perch.

Still the high points come mostly from Grand Archives, the slow, haze-dreamy splendor of “Sleepdriving,” the Brit-poppy, keyboard pounding swagger of “A Setting Sun,” the “If ever I, ever I, ever I” chorus of “George Kaminsky” as perfect a distillation of regret and wistfulness as was ever laid to melody. The songs all seem to marry a strong rhythmic background to lofting, untethered melodies, so that you have the impression of constant movement and endless space. Listening is like zooming past the mile markers on a plains state highway towards an impossibly distant horizon, grounded but infinite.

Brooke is uncomfortable talking between songs, and soon makes a joke of his awkwardness, venturing self-conscious banalities like “How about those Red Sox?” or “Sure is hot here!”, then grinning to see if we get the humor. He starts to tell a story about Bob Saget in the introduction to “Torn Foam Blue Couch,” but managed only a strangled, “He’s a weird dude,” before launching into the song. And that’s fine, because the slow hypnotic opening, the sudden surge of drum and guitar is more interesting than any celebrity tidbit he could come up with.

The main set closes with “The Crime Window”, the one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-others rocker on Grand Archives mostly placid album. The song sticks out. It sounds like a different band (it sounds like Hallelujah the Hills). But the first time you hear it, you say, “I bet they close the show with that.” Because truth is, if Grand Archives ever stopped wanting to be a hazy, mysterious, harmonies within harmonies pop outfit, they might turn into a pretty good bar band.

It would be a fine way to end things, except that people keep clapping. The band comes back and plays “Sundown,” by Gordon Lightfoot, a song that anyone who was alive in the 1970s probably never wants to hear again. It’s 1970s cheese at its cheese-whiz-iest, but it does allow the band to crank a dark and ominous bar blues riff and explore, a little bit, the source of those tight AM radio harmonies. They close with another original, “Louis Riel”, their voices ringing out like bells and chimes, the harmonies floating to the ceiling.

Wherever Grand Archives’ sound came from, we are lucky that it’s here.

[Photo Credit for Grand Archives: David Belisle]