Singular Voices: The Milk Carton Kids

SHOW TIMES
7:30pm - Doors
8:00pm - Vera Sola
8:30pm - Interval
9:00pm - The Milk Carton Kids

Grammy-nominated duo The Milk Carton Kids bring their delicious harmonies and intricate musicianship to City Recital Hall. Strap in for an evening of musical majesty and hilarious action.

Founded in 2011, The Milk Carton Kids swiftly emerged as a major force in the American folk tradition, blending ethereal harmonies and intricate musicianship with a uniquely powerful brand of contemporary songcraft.

2013’s debut The Ash & Clay proved their US breakthrough, earning The Milk Carton Kids their first Grammy Award nomination for Best Folk Album. A second Grammy nomination for Best American Roots Performance followed in 2015 for the track The City of Our Lady from the band’s acclaimed third studio album, Monterey, and 2018’s All the Things That I Did and All the Things That I Didn’t Do was nominated for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical.

The band recently debuted the album tracks When You’re Gone and Running on Sweet Smile, their first new music since their acclaimed 2019 album The Only Ones.

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Supporting The Milk Carton Kids is Vera Sola.

The poet, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Vera Sola is hard to pin down. Attempts to define her music have had her cast as the ‘lost love child of Leonard Cohen and Nancy Sinatra,’ ‘Nick Cave in the role of Staggolee,’ ‘a mordant Patsy Cline,’ ‘PJ Harvey at her most irate, teeth-bared.’

But its near impossible to find a truly fitting comparison. Described as ‘a living anachronism’, Vera Sola makes timeless, time-bending sound. In the words of the London Sunday Times, she’s a creature all her own, ‘an utterly singular talent’.

All of this was a long time coming. Despite a background in poetry, a successful career as a stage and voice actor, years of touring in Elvis Perkins’ band, and a collection of hundreds of secret songs, it wasn’t until early 2017 that she began experimenting with the idea of recording her own material.

Only then, when a series of life-altering events reframed her relationship to her music, did she book time at a studio in St. Louis and lock herself inside.

From there came her debut album ‘Shades’—written, performed, and produced entirely alone. Instruments she’d never before touched, hand-made percussion, chains and breaking glass, were arranged meticulously around multi-part harmonies, and brought to the fore a newly discovered vocal skill— her otherworldly vibrato.

The result is a record both complex and sparse, lyrics full of sorrow yet arch and wry. Sincere but sardonic, self-aware and scathing. Poems and stories set to music. Songs of the present that conjure the past.

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