by Emma Ingrisani
all photos by Emma Ingrisani
On the first leg of touring behind her new full-length Manzanita, Shana Cleveland and her band played the Mercury Lounge and Sultan Room on April 21st and 22nd, with support from Portland singer-songwriter MAITA and Brooklyn’s Foyer Red. In the live transmuting of its studio sound, Manzanita’s fractal sensations were ingeniously amplified—bursting into exciting new dimensions, cosmic and otherwise.
The voicing of an uncannily sentient natural world—possibly unearthly, sometimes gross, and not necessarily benign—is a bright vein snaking through Cleveland’s musical projects, from La Luz’s “surf noir” rock to the “psychedelic folk” of her previous solo albums Oh Man, Cover the Ground and Night of the Worm Moon. An exuberant engagement with genre is definitely part of it, with Cleveland’s fondness for science fiction and horror tropes (see, for example, an album inspired by Charles Burns’ Black Hole), but no category quite captures the pleasures of her spooky, woozy, groovy compositions.
Manzanita, framed around heightened and tender experiences of motherhood and partnership, is set against a wild California landscape, observed by a then-pregnant Cleveland as both threatening and curiously in tune with her changing body. With its sonic portrayals of insects, animals, and plants, the movement of light, and the feel of time passing, the album seems to reach for nothing less than a key to the universe.
At the New York shows, Cleveland and her bandmates operated in distinct but overlapping orbits: Will Sprott on keys and backing vocals, Luke Bergman on pedal steel guitar, Geneva Harrison on often-brushed drums and percussion, and Cleveland on vocals and acoustic guitar, gliding and soft-shoeing lightly around the stage. The music—mostly from Manzanita, but with a few earlier songs mixed in—was delivered in a near-continuous flow, with Harrison adding incidental clatters and rumbles between songs, as if from a gust of wind or a passing flight of birds.
“I just try to punctuate all my thoughts with little riffs,” Cleveland joked during the Sultan Room set, plucking a few notes as a folky punchline. Her warm and expressive fingerpicking is indeed the foundation of nearly every song on Manzanita, and was especially showcased in the performances of “A Ghost” and “Walking Through Morning Dew.” The solo instrumental “Bonanza Freeze,” set off slightly from the rest of the songs, also highlighted her command of the guitar for narrative exposition: its winding rhythms and chord progressions conjuring temperature drops and brittle textures.
Another distinctive feature of the performances was the ambient presence of Bergman's pedal steel. Its twangs, hums, and wails sometimes evoked the freaky Southern gothic of ’60s alt-country, but it was also used more subtly, painting thin layers of tone that bled around and into each melody. Combined with Sprott's deft piano phrases, this had vivid effects on the standouts “Gold Tower” and “Babe.”
Characteristically, the ensemble’s chops were balanced by a playful prevailing tone. Closing both nights, Cleveland swapped the eerie dreaminess of Manzanita for Night of the Worm Moon’s campy yet chilling title song, gleefully personifying a horror-film-worthy creature. “When I come for you, I’ll freeze your blood,” she sang, deadpanning—merely a monster explaining the state of things, as sparkling lines of guitar and faintly uttered “oohs” hung in the air. It was a perfectly surreal conclusion to an impressive array: love, beauty, terror, and the unknown, all accounted for.
