Events

[FOLK] It can be difficult keeping it fresh 35 years into a musical career on the folky fringes of pop music, and Indigo Girls have never been ones to dawdle longer than two or three years between releases. Mitchell Froom produced 2009’s stunning Poseidon and the Bitter Bug, the duo’s first release on their own imprint (distributed via Vanguard) and a creative high point in their post-millennium catalogue. But 2011’s Beauty Queen Sister felt considerably less inspired. To recharge their mojo and throw a curveball at recurring (hackneyed?) production choices, Amy Ray and Emily Saliers enlisted the talents of producer Jordan Brooke Hamlin after having been mutually impressed with her work on Lucy Wainwright Roche’s latest. It’s a gamble that paid off, making One Lost Day, out late this past spring, the most musically innovative record the Indigos have released since the late 1990’s. Longtime fans can rejoice that the core sound isn’t lost in the mix, but Hamlin’s game-changing style brought in a new series of engineers and players for the Girls to work with. Hamlin’s taste for oddball instrumentation results in surprisingly placed horns, strings, and pockets of unexpected percussion. Lyrically, One Lost Day revels in the bittersweet acknowledgement of wisdom gained from growing older, but there’s a youthful punch to the tracks balancing that out, making it one of the duo’s most memorable collections. Indigo Girls arrive in Buffalo this Saturday, November 14 for a gig at Babeville’s Asbury Hall with A Fragile Tomorrow that’ll feature a sizeable chunk of the new songs amid crowd pleasing classics like “Get Out the Map” and “Power of Two.”