THE ALTERNATE REALITY OF ELVIS PERKINS Singer/songwriter is back with unrepentantly obscure new album, I Aubade
What’s the deal?
Elvis Perkins made a notable dent as a singer/songwriter of promising, poetic eccentricity with 2007’s mournful Ash Wednesday — a poignant, folk-pop elegy for departed parents Anthony Perkins (of Psycho infamy) and Berry Berenson, a photographer and actress who perished on one of the flights that crashed into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001— and 2009’s brighter, lusher “band” record, Elvis Perkins in Dear
land.
He then disappeared with nary a trace until he resurfaced earlier this year with the unrepentantly obscure I
Aubade.
It’s an experience akin to what happens when you start paying closer and closer attention to your dreams: all of a sudden an entire, rich and previously camouflaged alternate reality opens up to you.
If that doesn’t sell you on Perkins, perhaps invoking such kindred spirits as Robert Wyatt, Sparklehorse, Timber Timbre, John Lennon at his wooziest and Thom Yorke at his crooniest will help coax you on board. Dude is an original.
Sum up what you do in a few simple sentences.
“I make songs and am presently in the mode of moving them from city to city, country to country and nightly with a band, reanimating them before an assembly of strangers. Those are, for the most part, solely adults, though the other afternoon in Tourcoing, France, we did so for a crowd of children and their folk. For them, my ‘Doomsday’ became ‘Bloomsday.’ ”
What’s a song I need to hear right now?
“I Came for Fire.” Like dreaming next to a shortwave radio.
Where can I see him play?
Monday, Dec. 14, at the Garrison.