It’s not often you attend a political fundraiser where the entertainment is a raggedy be-hatted trio of lovable hobos who blast though clanging, joyous numbers with choruses like “The skyline’s on fire!” and filter a haunting cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Bird On a Wire” through a warm bath of electric hum. The Low Anthem can be both gentle and calamitous at once, and on their new Oh My God, Charlie Darwin, they expand on what what NPR referred to as their “hand-made songs” and deliver a devastatingly beautiful record of love, death, and the death of love painstakingly infused with the sound of icy coastal waters and vast, sun soaked horizons.

The album was recorded on wintry Block Island this past January and the atmosphere of that bleak locale surely lent a windswept and fatally romantic aura to the proceedings as the songs are utterly drowned in death and desolation yet hope seems to magically spring up; “If your pilot light should die/do not quake and do not bark/you will find the spark” from the delicate and plaintive “Don’t Tremble”, and “This island shall be shackled to her waters/here we vow to never change” from “Cage The Songbird”.

The album’s creaking, almost entirely acoustic sound is drenched in softly weezing harmonium, harmonica and clarinet, rickety upright bass, banjo and drums and the graceful drunken swoon of gorgeous backing vocals from multi-instrumentalists Jeff Prystowsky and Jocie Adams.

And the singing, Jesus Christ the singing. Songwriter and vocalist Ben Knox Miller is so great at alternating between flinty, desperate and tender crooning (on the opening twin salvos “Charlie Darwin” and the utterly heartbreaking “To Ohio”) and the raw throated howling of the aforementioned “The skyline’s on fire!” chorus wail from “The Horizon is a Beltway.” With this record Mr. Miller has proved himself the best singer in Providence, and probably the best songwriter too.

Don’t deny yourself this record, and make sure you see The Low Anthem before they break our hearts and move to greener pastures.

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