First Listen: Lowland Hum, ‘Lowland Hum’

Jewly Hight — Sun, 05 Apr 2015 23:03:00 +0000

Daniel Levi Goans and Lauren Plank Goans are used to fielding questions about the overlap between their musical and marital partnerships. If anything, they’ve invited this sort of curiosity by telling their backstory the way they have: him striking up a conversation after overhearing her singing to herself at a party; their courtship flowering from her harmonizing on his solo record; the simultaneous joining of their domestic lives and creative output with the formation of the duo Lowland Hum.

On their debut album, Native Air, and in front of audiences, the Greensboro, N.C., couple set out to perform their intimacy and invite listeners into the cocooned imaginative space they’ve chosen to share with each other. More interested in the sensuous potential of performance than one might expect a folk act to be, they’d erect a shredded fabric backdrop behind them, burn essential oils (where venues would allow it), hand out homemade hymnals of their lyrics and press their reedy voices together. Sonically, though, their impressionistic, narrative folk was deliberately sparse; that way, they reasoned, harried listeners would find room to breathe. But even such an artful quiet can come to feel suffocating.

During the wordless opening track of Lowland Hum’s self-titled second album, Lauren Plank Goans offers a delicate, ruminative melodic idea that’s soon crowded by a lumbering loop and the tangled echoes of other, contrasting vocal parts. It’s the sound of a voice being squeezed out of an interior space.

Benefiting from a freewheeling, beefed-up studio band, the dynamic range of this 13-song set runs from hushed insularity to ardent expansiveness, alighting on dozens of gradations between. The sunshine-infused pop number “Olivia” depicts lovers trying to steal time together. The pensive, fingerpicked “Rolling And Rolling” ponders the ways that growing up erodes a person’s sense of self. The somber hymn “Lautrec” is a meditation on the pain that French painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec might have been purging in his work, while the bittersweet folk-rocker “Odell” conjures the flattening emotional burdens his mother bore.

The Goans spend the final minute and a half of Lowland Hum repeating, “I keep looking at my cell phone / Can’t stop looking at my cell phone,” as they bend and twist their voices into different harmonic intervals, tones and inflections. As they cycle through disappointment, alarm and resignation, they sound altogether animated by the disquiet.

Lowland Hum: Tiny Desk Concert

Bob Boilen — Thu, 06 Mar 2014 14:00:00 +0000

It’s hard to convey the sound of two people in love, but Lowland Hum does that effortlessly. Daniel Levi Goans and Lauren Plank are now Daniel and Lauren Goans; they met a few years ago and spent much of their first married year on the road, singing together on small stages and at house concerts across the country. Daniel was a folksinger in North Carolina, while Lauren had aspirations to sing but mostly did it privately. She has a passion for making things with paper, and you’ll see that in the little black book of lyrics she hands out at shows. This music is mostly unadorned and pure, with considerable attention to detail. Lauren’s voice sounds refreshing and simple, and Daniel’s passion shakes from his head and literally to his feet. They tour with a few homemade wooden platforms inlaid with small metal jingles — the kind you’d find on a tambourine — and that enhances Daniel’s stomp. Together, they have one album called Native Air, and they joyfully perform three songs from that record here. Set List

“War Is Over”
“Pocket Knife”
“Four Sisters, Pt. One”

Credits Producers: Bob Boilen, Denise DeBelius; Audio Engineer: Kevin Wait; Videographers: Denise DeBelius, Gabriella Garcia-Pardo, Olivia Merrion; photo by Meredith Rizzo/NPR

Lowland Hum – Bandwidth

First Listen: Lowland Hum, ‘Lowland Hum’

Lowland Hum: Tiny Desk Concert