Sitting comfortably under the radar until about two months ago, Karl Smith’s follow-up to Sodastream seemed to arrive fully formed, first with a sweeping live presence and then with a nuanced LP, The Lives of Lee Memorial. The five-piece Lee Memorial very much counters his previous duo’s folky sparseness, plunging Smith’s literate songwriting and high-leaning vocals into dense arrangements fraught with stormy peaks and forlorn lows.

Smith’s singing is more scrappy than poised these days, and he’s immersed himself in the assured backing of guitarist Tom Lyngcoln (Nation Blue), bassist Steve Thomas (Zond), drummer Laura MacFarlane (Ninety Nine) and multi-instrumentalist Madeline Spawton, who swaps cello, keys, and clarinet. At this well-attended album launch, a few songs even featured a third guitarist or guest trombonist.

As one might expect from a young band launching a debut album, Lee Memorial played the entire record, though not in order. The set commenced with album closer ‘7 Minute Planes’, a feast of rumbling distortion and yearning lyrics well aided by Spawton’s clarinet and MacFarlane’s very basic, low-set drum kit. From there ,the band exercised its atmospheric powers with ‘Mayflower’, the setting-specific ‘Berlin’, and ‘Baby Doll’, so full of intentional loose ends that a newer song sounded tight next to it.

The set’s middle was made quite serious by the pairing of the bigotry-assaying ‘Boxing’ and the graphic character study ‘Private Joseph Skelling’, an unflinching account of murder and rape through the eyes of the soldier committing those acts. But the crowd reacted vigorously when the song finished, and the fever broke with the much lighter ‘Shoulders And Floors’. After Smith stumbled a bit through an almost garage-y new song, he confessed, “That’s what happens when you don’t know a song very well.”

He recovered nicely with the bracing ‘Listen To Yourself’, complete with third guitar and MacFarlane’s backing vocals. Trombone lent a peppy vibe to the pop-driven ‘Drifting’ and Lee Memorial capped the night with album opener ‘All These Things’ and the reedy ‘Long Days in Bed’. Before digging into that last one, Smith took a moment to remind the assembled punters, “This is everything we know. Now you know it.”

by Doug Wallen