Clogs, The Creatures In The Garden Of Lady Walton

Terms like post-rock and post-classical (or indie classical) have been coined to attempt to locate bands like Clogs somewhere in the musical landscape. What would you make of this violin/guitar/bassoon/percussion quartet? Clogs is both an award-winning chamber music group (the annual Adventurous Programming award from Chamber Music America), and a "sister group" to top-drawer indie rock band the National: guitarist Bryce Dessner plays in both and violinist and vocalist and composer Padma Newsome often plays keyboards for that band. Clogs have developed an accessible style of composition that draws on both Renaissance lute and keyboard music, as well as American minimalism. Now, with their fifth album, Newsome unveils a song cycle — one that features his own voice and those of some of indie rock's most distinctive singers.

The Creatures In The Garden Of Lady Walton refers to the Italian island estate of the late great British composer, Sir William Walton where his wife maintained a garden and which is now a kind of composers' retreat. It was there that Newsome created a stunning set of songs, which truly blur the boundaries between rock and a classical song cycle. There are still instrumental works, like the lovely "I Used to Do," but many of the highlights here are vocal works. Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond adds her bell-like sound to Newsome's own voice, which has a fragile beauty, in the opener "Cocodrillo," a bit of vocal sound painting that sounds like an aviary imagined by Meredith Monk and Steve Reich. The National's Matt Berninger appears on "Last Song," which could almost be a semi-unplugged song from that band's catalog; Sufjan Stevens joins Worden on the finale, "Raise the Flag." Other highlights include the bittersweet, deceptively simple "Red Seas," and "The Owl Of Love," a modern extension of the tradition of English madrigal singing from the time of Shakespeare.