Minivan (record release) with Stephen Becker and Katy Pinke — live event

It’s easy to become absorbed by the raw musicianship on display throughout A Calm That Shifts, Brooklyn singer-songwriter Stephen Becker’s debut full-length LP. Its psychedelic pop songs lean into hairpin turns in song structure, style, and emotional affect. Becker’s proficiency as a musician is breathtaking—he plays almost every instrument on the record—evidencing a formidable jazz pedigree and an appreciation for the technical prowess of progressive 2000s indie-rock units like Dirty Projectors, St. Vincent, and Grizzly Bear. It’s difficult to resist playing each of these tracks back to latch onto a musical throughline only caught after it was almost over: a bit of sinuous guitar and synth counterpoint, a pivot between a fractured groove and rhythmic malfunction, or a gorgeous Brian Wilson-reminiscent chord modulation. Katy Pinke’s songs are self-examinations—cerebral and unsparing, but reaching toward a more promising future. The Manhattan-based singer-songwriter, painter and actor mixes the precise and wry delivery of The Roches and Connie Converse with the idiosyncratic songforms of her espoused hero Bill Callahan. The songs on her self-titled debut album possess a direct and inviting quality, but within each, a quiet battle is being waged in an ongoing struggle to, as Pinke puts it, “unconditionally love a fragmented self.” The album strips Pinke’s art down to its absolute essence. At the home studio of Phil Weinrobe (Adrianne Lenker, Cass McCombs), she recorded her vocals and minimal guitar accompaniments live with drummer Jeremy Gustin in front of an audience of a few friends. The idea was to capture the energy of Pinke’s live shows—storied events in the NYC indie rock scene. (Artists she has shared the stage with include Laura Veirs, Jolie Holland, TV On the Radio’s Kyp Malone, and Indigo Sparke.) The record’s most devastating moments are sometimes also its most fun (“Tomato,” “One Coin”). Elsewhere, there are bittersweet moments of effortless beauty (“Grapefruit,” “Strawman”). In Pinke’s music, life sometimes feels like a series of pushes into a vast, hopeful unknown, and the time spent conserving our energy in between them. All we can do, she hypothesizes, is try to stay in tune with ourselves while waiting for the next opportunity to try again.

Starts: 2024-07-26T20:00:55Z

Ends: 2024-07-26T22:00:55Z

Where: 497 Rogers Avenue, New York 11225, United States

Price: $15.0

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