Grass Widow

It’s sometimes easy, when listening to notes and beats and voices disembodied on a record, to take for granted the technical facts about what a band is actually doing. But it was impossible to shake a sort of technical wonder all throughout Grass Widow’s set on Sunday, with the simple innovation of the band’s set-up staring us all down relentlessly. Grass Widow is a band without a frontperson—and their live show provokes in you, in the first few moments, a brief meditation on the idea of the frontperson (I pictured, as a metonym, the extravagantly serpentlike singer I’d recently seen fronting a rap-rock band), followed by the realization that a lot of frontpeople are actually very silly (this guy really just had a way of slithering in just about every direction), followed quickly by a failure to worry about any band other than the one playing before you.

So, about that band: Raven Mahon plays guitars, Lillian Maring plays drums, Hannah Lew plays bass. And all three sing, in equal measure but in divergent ranges and rhythms—the effect is dynamic, dizzying, and more than a little bit haunting. A friend, gushing about them after their set, compared their sound to a prism, and I’ll second that. Grass Widow are animated by a tension between fragmentation and wholeness, a dense center from which a lot of ethereal stuff bounces forth.

Their set was a bit lop-sided, material-wise. They first barreled through tracks from their earlier self-titled releases (a high point of which was the turbulently tempo’d “Out of Body Experience”), but the band really fell into a groove when they played some songs from their latest record, Past Time. Grass Widow still have a little ways to go in terms of being a totally riveting live band—their set could benefit from some general tightening up and just an extra dash of energy. But the impressive development from their old material (meaning it was recorded last year) to the new (meaning, this year) shows a band progressing rapidly and gives us all reason to believe that Grass Widow’s unique, already compelling approach will only get better in time.