A fascinating Columbia band comes back to life after a four-year absence
Trying to encapsulate Columbia band Stagbriar's sound in words makes one realize how futile it can sometimes be to write about music. The group — based around the nucleus of siblings, singers, and multi-instrumentalists Alex and Emily McCollum — isn't strictly acoustic enough to count as folk music, or heavy enough to count as indie rock, and there's no real genre-hyphenate like "folk-rock" that properly describes their music.
Perhaps it's best to instead talk about the individual elements. On their first full-length album, Quasi-Hymns, Murder-Ballads, and Tales of How the Hero Died, the McCollums deliver stunning, shiver-inducing vocal harmonies that seem so deeply intertwined that they're almost one voice. There are unkempt electric guitars and delicately strummed acoustic ones. There are propulsive rock songs and shimmering ballads and haunting songs that seem to hang in the air like mist or clouds over the mountains. There are banjos and cellos and atmospheric drones and all sorts of angular, unexpected production flourishes that take seemingly conventional song-structures and cast them through a funhouse mirror.
It's Americana music as played by musicians who don't especially care for Americana music.
Vincent Harris, Charleston City Paper
