Darlingside used to have a drummer. But he sort of got in the way. Not in the spatial sense of “got in the way”; rather, in the aural sense. Basically you had these crisp, air-tight, laser-locked voices—four of them, pretending to be one—struggling to appropriately comingle with the drums. No need for a caucus to tabulate that four voices beat a lone drummer every time, so after a 2012 self-released CD the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based band reduced its number by one.
Now, whenever these Williams College grads sing together onstage or in the studio you’ll find multi-instrumentalists Dave Senft, Don Mitchell, Auyon Mukharji, and Harris Paseltiner huddled in a semi-circle ’round a shared microphone; every song is written by all four of them, so singing in unison is an extension of the way they write. With hues of ’60s folk, chamber pop, bluegrass, and even classical, organically played on rootsy instruments led by acoustic and 12-string electric guitars, banjo, fiddle, mandolin, cello, and bass, and colored with Wurlitzer, auto-chord organ, piano, and harmonium, Darlingside’s music resides not in the here and now, but smack dab in ’60s and ’70s Laurel Canyon.
For their sophomore release, Birds Say, Darlingside holed up in a Boston studio and together with engineer/co-producer Dan Cardinal created a 13-song treasure that boasts oodles of grace and style, and a maturity rare in a recording career so young. Written, Mitchell says, as they reflected on their “childhoods, our transition into adulthood together, and the complexities of life that we all have to grapple with now,” Birds Say mostly belies the clever and witty personalities these guys effortlessly present onstage; for a peek into that cleverness, look at their name, Darlingside. What is that? It’ll hit you when you blend the suffix cide, meaning killer or the act of killing in words like pesticide and insecticide, with the “kill your darlings” advice given to fledgling writers—i.e., if you fall in love with a word or line that you’ve written, kill it to prevent overuse. Darlingside, then, is shrewdly a softer spelling of Darlingcide.
