Beaten Awake
Let's Get Simplified (Audio Eagle/Fat Possum) Simplicity can be a beautiful thing. The garage-blues duo Black Keys certainly know the power of a less-is-more aesthetic. Beaten Awake, an outfit from Kent, Ohio, signed to Keys drummer Patrick Carney's new Audio Eagle label, understands simplicity, too, albeit of a different sort. The foursome's arresting debut has an amplitude of movement, wonder, and heartache, but the turbulent fullness of its nocturnal life is rendered in a deceptively spartan surface of subtly employed guitars, conversational drumming, and haunted sense of place. The singed pleas and tipsy clarity rendered by singer-songwriters Jon Finley and Joel McAdams lend bruised charm and freighted drama to standout tracks such as the Mark Kozelek-esque meditation, "Ghost Bought A Bicycle," and Sparklehorse-meets-My Morning Jacket shiver of "All Up All Close." Much in the spirit of ravishingly wounded souls such as Kozelek or Centr-O-Matic's Will Johnson, Beaten Awake sounds as if it has been left in the lurch by everybody who mattered and has retreated to its tree house, where the guitars and gin are stashed. [Jonathan Perry]