Music / Reviews
Review: Darlingside, The Exchange – ‘Multilayered loveliness’
Harris Paseltiner is smiling. He’s been smiling for ages. Just looking out into a ridiculously packed Exchange, delighted at the way Bristol has fallen in love with the five-piece from Boston.
It’s been years since they were here, but Darlingside are welcomed like favourite children.
Pasteliner plays acoustic guitar and cello, sings some of the most gorgeous harmonies this side of Laurel Canyon and smiles. A lot.
is needed now More than ever
There’s something irresistible about the music that Darlingside make. The harmonies are undeniable, impossible to ignore, utterly impeccable. Three, four, five voices overlapping, gently lacing together, weaving intricately.
Green & Evergreen is suffused with sunshine, the voices spreading golden light across a field that’s so deep, so lush.
Green Light, taken from new album Everything is Alive, owes the tiniest of debts to The Beatles. It is faintly psychedelic, has the merest hint of reverse-tape, Revolver-era, Indian-ness and is simply lovely.
Auyon Mukharji’s mandolin carving a high line that the voices follow.
It’s easy to get lost in all of this gorgeousness, it’s like being huddled under a velvet curtain, it’s warm and soft, overwhelming for the senses.
Time Will Be is beautifully floaty, the chorus somehow anchoring each voice to the stage before they just drift off, heavenwards. Don Mitchell’s banjo and Mukharji’s plucked violin sprinkling the whole thing with country magic-dust.
By the time all five stroll off of the stage and take their places amongst the audience, for two songs, the heat in the Exchange is almost too much to bear.
Singing without amplification, as up-close-and-personal as it is possible to be, the band settle around a campfire on the warmest of nights. The flame-flicker is provided by countless phones but Darlingside bring the cordiality, the friendliness.
Denver and The Breaking of the Day are impossibly delicate, Simon & Garfunkel folk-pop, both received with a pin-drop hush.
The multilayered loveliness could get a bit suffocating were it not for the genuinely celebratory atmosphere.
Bassist, Molly Parden, is wry and smart, Mukharji amusing, Pasteliner unable to comprehend the majesty that is Gloucester Services (“they sell hedgehog shaped chocolates!”). They share in the wide-eyed wonder that they create around them.
After all of the CSNY harmonies it is left to some serious propulsive bounce to see the evening home. Best of The Best of Times is stutter-y and jitter-y, only allowing the sunshine to peek through occasionally.
Mukharji’s hi-speed mandolin and Ben Burns, on drums, pushing the harmonies around. Eliza I See is pure 60’s sunshine pop deliciousness.
Pasteliner leads the singing, stopping every now and then to grin. It’s a grin that tells of sunlight and friendship, of glorious harmonies and love.
It’s a smile that lights up the whole room.
Main photo: Gavin McNamara
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