Heartcore

We Say...

Review by Philip Sherburne

How do two people make such a big sound with so little? At most, the songs on Heartcore, the debut from Wildbirds & Peacedrums, feature drums, multi-tracked vocals and a few strands of guitar, piano or glockenspiel; at their leanest, they feature nothing but cymbal, snare and naked larynx. It doesn't hurt that the husband-wife duo of Andreas Werliin and Mariam Wallentin is far more skilled than your average four-track minimalists: Werliin is a powerful, versatile drummer who can go from galloping to bit-clampingly restrained in a heartbeat; Wallentin is less a singer than a kind of vocal sorceress, alternately conjuring P.J. Harvey, Kate Bush and Cat Power as she slips between bellow and coo, sounding as if she were channeling the devout Appalachian singers of a century ago — singing in tongues, as it were.

Their timekeeping is a wild spirit in search of a body — call it folk if you must, but their music is steeped in the force of jazz at its most emphatic, and rock at its most elastic. On "Bird," a duo for voice and low toms, Werliin draws elliptic rhythms as Wallentin searches for her way out of the spinning cage. "Doubt/Hope" keeps steadier tempo, but it's no less electrifying, with snares and handclaps trading short, staccato phrases while the absence of a downbeat keeps the whole thing hanging on tenterhooks. Other songs are more traditional: "I Can't Tell in His Eyes" approximates a kind of shuffling Americana, and "The Battle in Water" vaguely recalls the plaintive rock of Yo La Tengo or Versus, unplugged. But for the most part, the record stays as focused as its title would suggest, burrowing deep to the point where muscle and pulse become one.