The Daily Campus

Issue date: 2/9/09 Section: Focus

Media Credit: Ed Ryan Marissa Nadler performs at WHUS's indie rock show.

A surprising number of UConn students clambered out of their snow caverns on a freezing Friday night for an evening of indie-folk guitar balladry in the Student Union, hosted by campus radio station WHUS. Three performers were scheduled to appear, but with one of them, Luke Temple, stranded somewhere outside of New York City in a broken-down car, according to the presenters, the night took on an all-out feminine vibe suggestive of an impromptu Lilith Fair, with acoustic guitars a-waving and astrological references blowing in the wind.

Taking the stage first, Brie Sullivan and violinist Eric Lee, performing as Grace & Catastrophe, initiated the full-frontal folk assault.

"It's very blue up here," Lee mentioned.

And indeed the lighting design would have been perfect over the radio, blanketing as it did the coffeehouse duo in saturated indigo and cerulean.

Sullivan's honey-covered, full-throated voice drifted out on songs as melancholy as the blues enveloping the stage. The songs ran the gamut, from visions of Ani DiFranco received in a lucid dream, through a ballad of astrological incompatibility, to a nylon-stringed take on Pete Wentz's musical abilities (this last prompting one of Sullivan's friends to dub her Fall Out Brie). One of the closing numbers even called for some audience participation. Perhaps this is how Grace & Catastrophe rack up their "Tens of dollars in the folk industry," as Sullivan put it.

Marissa Nadler, the final act of the night, came onstage wearing a tiara and a violet gown. This was fitting garb for a mermaid princess from some mystic Confederate state, which was exactly what her warbling, elfin voice suggested. WHUS was not slacking in the slightest in their quest to bring music to the fairy people.

Like Sullivan and Lee, Nadler opened her set with a few acoustic ballads, starting off like Joanna Newsom on a month-long Tyrannosaurus Rex bender. Nadler, a Massachusetts resident, said she was raised partly on country music, and listed songstresses Joni Mitchell and Kate Bush among her greatest influences. Bush's influence was especially apparent in her voice, which stroked the roof beams of the Student Union ballroom like the cries of an ersatz Appalachian tree nymph with heartwood sap running down her dress. Nadler's strange, sweet warble perfectly suited the lyrics of her songs, which ranged from quasi-traditional musings on lovers in cedar coffins to "River of Dirt." "It's a song about mental disintegration," Nadler said.

Nadler was also joined by her backing band, who added the thump of a drum kit and the eerie hum of an electric organ, as well as some seriously ghostly harmony vocals, to her brokenhearted indie croons.

Although the evening was cut short by Temple's car troubles, the audience seemed satisfied by their visit to the fatal flower garden.

"Marissa Nadler's got a beautiful voice," said Steven Schmidt, an HDFS graduate student.

And the organizers at WHUS have expectations of getting together another show sometime this semester.

"We're hoping to put one on later in the spring," said Maige Doocy. Spring will be a fitting time to showcase more of the fairy folk.

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