Folk-pop quartet Darlingside to perform at The Center for the Arts on Oct. 25

The Center for the Arts warmly welcomes Darlingside to the Marisa Funk Theater on October 25, 2022. Boston-based quartet Darlingside, composed of four of the most charming musicians on the planet, saw their ten-year anniversary in May of 2020, with five albums and several EPs released to date.

The band has long been praised for their harmonies and intelligent songwriting, described by NPR as “exquisitely-arranged, literary-minded, baroque folk-pop,” “difficult to categorize with a sound that is inventive, imaginative and captivating,” and which The New Yorker compared to David Crosby and the Byrds.

Their dynamic presence (crowded tightly together onstage around a single microphone for the audience to witness four voices turn to a singular texture of sound), paired with their humor, sharp wit and wordplay, have made them a live-performance favorite, and their songs treasures for literary and lyric-loving fans.

Their soaring 4-part harmonies derive from the pure talent of Auyon Mukharji on violin and mandolin, Don Mitchell on guitar and banjo, Dave Senft on guitar, bass and kick drum, and Harris Paseltiner on guitar and cello. Together, their singing is layered on a bed of percussive and melodic tones, made with guitars both acoustic and electric, violin, cello, mandolin and a tiny synthesizer.

The beauty in their cresting arrangements is in the simplicity of their layered voices and raw acoustics with songs that build like a well written narrative –  expansive depth, intriguing anticipation and finishing with a refined resolve.  

If Darlingside’s first album, Birds Say (2015), focused on the past through nostalgia and memory, and their second, Extralife (2018), contemplated uncertain futures, Fish Pond Fish (2020) stands firmly in the present, taking stock of what’s here and now. Fish Pond Fish is one of geology, meteorology, ornithology, astronomy and botany – creating natural history in songs, with an album that catalogs the weird nooks of our world with the same curiosity of a botanist’s time-worn field journal through the ecology of emotional experience. Intellectually high concept aside, in this album of stasis and change, many components of the initial demos were preserved as layers in the produced tracks to retain the spirit of the initial recordings, resulting in a collection of songs that is simultaneously the most bedroom-tracked and production-heavy full-length album that the band has yet released.

The bedrock of the album reflects democratic collaboration, pervading almost every aspect of its making—from the multi-layered sound to the early stages of songwriting. “There’s truth beyond the bounds of your horizons,” Auyon Mukharji says of collaborating with three other people. “It’s like you’re searching through three-fourths of foreign consciousness. Bringing you to a place you couldn’t imagine. You move beyond yourself.” 

Patrons will be moved by the impeccably detailed yet warmly provocative performance of Darlingside at The Center for the Arts on October 25, 2022.