Home > MUSIC > Elvis Perkins in Dearland Presented by World Music/CRASHarts

• Tweet
• Outlook
• ICAL
• PRINT
• Email
• Feedback

• RSS

• Official Website
• Buy Tickets
• Add to My Favorites

Elvis Perkins in Dearland Presented by World Music/CRASHarts

Presented by World Music/CRASHarts at The Brattle Theatre

April 22, 2009

Add Review/Comment
Comment on Facebook

When Elvis Perkins's first album, Ash Wednesday, was released in early 2007, critics and music fans almost universally praised it. A nuanced meditation on grief and death, Ash Wednesday is a chronologically sequenced album that begins before September 11, and ends after, shaped largely by the tragic events of that day. Perkins's mother, photographer Berre Berenson died on one of those flights, a day before the 9th anniversary of the passing of his father, actor Anthony Perkins. After the release of Ash Wednesday, which was a solo record, Perkins took to the road with his band, Elvis Perkins in Dearland, which includes multi-instrumentalists Brigham Brough, Wyndham Boylan-Garnett and Nick Kinsey. On this tour, the band honed many of the new songs that would become their eponymous release, due out in March 2009. Even while creating its own particular sound, the band is clearly influenced by a range of American roots music, as evidenced by the roughened harmonica licks punctuating Elvis's verses, the wicked, bluesy squeal of the organ or the mournful tromp of the tuba. The band has been compared to Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, Bob Dylan, Arcade Fire and Neutral Milk Hotel. To witness an Elvis Perkins in Dearland performance is to witness a happening-the band has gained a reputation for stunning live shows that are both intimate and energetic. Moments of intense beauty, in which the room falls under the trance of Elvis's magnetic presence, can easily flow into joyous, foot-stomping numbers that bring down the house.