The Staves w/ Trevor Sensor at Cedar Cultural Center, Minneapolis (03 June 2016)

Trevor Sensor

Opening the long sold-out evening at the Cedar Cultural Center was singer-songwriting troubadour from Illinois, Trevor Sensor, whose EP, Texas Girls and Jesus Christ came out at the end of March.  Sounding like being at the crossroads of a young Dylan, Jake Bugg, and Steve Forbert, Sensor moved from piano to acoustic guitar on a “song about death” called ‘The Reaper Man’, ‘Judas Said to be a Man’ and a Bruce Cockburn cover of ‘Pacing the Cage’.



Ending with ‘Nothing is Fair’, the song evoked a Woody Guthrie-like civil unrest about a South Carolina 2015 shooting of an unarmed black man, with Sensor exclaiming “I’m so damn scared for my generation, your mind’s so numb, with little patience.” Ferocious one moment, gentle and brooding the next, Sensor’s song range and talent seem to only be growing.

The Staves

Watford, UK folk sister trio The Staves didn’t have to sing a note to have the crowd on their side for their 80 min. performance- the show had already been sold out for months, the rabid but respectful audience gleamed and swooned with their every move, and members of Bon Iver (who they’ve been touring with) and Aero Flynn (drummer Dave Power’s other band) were cheering them on from the back of the room.



Still, the sisters (Emily Staveley-Taylor; Jessica Staveley-Taylor; Camilla Staveley-Taylor) proved endearing, mesmerizing, and a little playful on this, their opening night after recently touring Australia and Southeast Asia.



The synchronicity of their sibling voices was immediately evident in the opening, acapella ‘Hopeless’, a new track added to the extended version of previous full-length  If I Was (recorded in Wisconsin and on Nonesuch Records).



‘Sleeping in a Car’, the title track of their latest EP was played early on, with its minimalist percussion, building tempo, and lyrics admitting that it’s all “bigger than us”. “Who hasn’t slept in a car?” the girls joked after, “What, …wife kicked you out again?’ they continued.



“…Sisters!” someone up front shouted between songs, “…yeah…what else do you see?” they answered back, to crowd laughter.  The trio even laughed off trying to hold a note on the next song and what could be better than three sisters harmonizing? – sometimes looping their own voices to sound like even more of a large choir.



Many of the songs had that “Wisconsin walk in the snowy woods” atmospheric that so many are locally used to with Bon Iver, but the in-tandem vocals and moving melodies often take the songs elsewhere.



‘Don’t Let Me Down’, as an example, done mid-set as their drummer left for a short break, had a spinning, dizzying chorus that took you completely into the rabbit hole along with them.



After saying how familiar they are with the upper Midwest and excited to be “playing some music that was conceived, born and raised around here”, the spanning ‘Damn It All’ started with just quiet plucking and singing, before moving full speed, into something much bigger.

Setlist

Two-thirds of the way through, one of the sisters revealed to the audience how hard it was to harmonize for her, as her earpiece monitor had seemed to inadvertently dial into the wireless frequency of a nearby radio station in the background, only to have the other two sisters admit the very same thing—“ I thought I was going mad”, one replied.



‘Make It Holy’ and 2012’s ‘Winter Trees’ finished the main set, the latter painting the picture effectively with opening lyric, “White winter trees covered in snow I don’t mind, I don’t mind I think of you now, here in the cold”.



For the encore, Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon did not get on stage as a few in the crowd were hoping,  but launching into the new ‘Tired as F*#k’, the girls seemed anything but that.  ‘Teeth White’ ended the evening, an up tempo fun number with lyric “I don’t know what to expect / I feel a disconnect / and in all my years I’ve never felt so young” that proves the road ahead is wide open and in complete harmony.