Add Seattle band Slow Skate to the lineage of hazy, glacially-moving, female-led bands that includes Mazzy Star, Cowboy Junkies, and, more recently, the Sub Pop-signed duo Beach House. That last band especially comes to mind listening to Slow Skates latest Soundcloud offerings, Silver Screen and When Sugar Was King. Singer Caitlin Sherman has a clean, Valium-calm voice that unfolds with surprising range and emotionwarm and heavy one moment, ghostly light the next. The bands songs are appropriately unhurried, reverb-treated, and vintage-sounding, all grainy, time-keeping drums, wavering and twangy guitars, and accents of piano or harpsichord. This is stretch-out-and-wait sort of stuff, not for the ADD-inclined, but it doesnt plod so much as make a virtue of slowness, Shermans lingering syllables perfectly enacting the aching and longing hinted at in her lyrics. With Alameda, The Northern Key. ERIC GRANDY
Fri., May 27, 10 p.m., 2011
