Chairlift Ascends Pop Music Heights

Chairlift-appropriately named-is a band on the rise.

This unsigned Coloradoan trio-at least in the collegiate sense, as two members met in a University of Colorado at Boulder recitation section-have recently relocated to Brooklyn. Since, they have been playing their absurdly catchy music in venues from Bard College to the Bowery and everywhere in between. Bassist Kyle McCabe, guitarist and singer Aaron Davis, and singer and keyboardist Caroline Polachek stage a live show that, in spite of-and often abetted by-their inexperience and raw potential, is as delightful as anything you're likely to pay triple the price for in this city. But it hasn't always been that way.

"Our first show was a total disaster," Polacheck said in an interview. "There was a drunken bum who'd come in off the street and was trying to take the mic away from Davis mid-song." With only a few original songs in its repertoire back then, the band padded its early sets with Elliott Smith covers, only to find itself recording in the late troubadour's famed studio. According to Davis, "Being around Elliott's piano, his guitars, and in the room he wrote and recorded in changed our [the band's] aesthetic."

Beyond their shared whisper of a delivery, however, Davis and his band don't sound a thing like their most immediate influence. Critics have been quick to peg Chairlift as a derivation of Rilo Kiley, but such a label denies the band its myriad charms and epic ambitions. Not only could Jenny Lewis live comfortably in the shadow cast by Polachek's voice, but the three-piece outfit owns the synth in ways far more established bands never have. Chairlift goes toe-to-toe with The Postal Service in the bouncy "Bruises" and rubs up against recent Radiohead with "The Doves of Summer." Yet the band's impeccably tight song-writing is perhaps most evident in "Don't Give A Damn," a faux-country duet where the band's three members mesh perfectly to give Neko Case a run for her money.

As for Smith, Polachek attributes his influence in much the same way she does that of the Fiery Furnaces. Ostensibly, the bands don't sound a thing like one another, but Caroline made a dead-on observation when she said, "The way they pair stripped-down vocals with a sarcastic mess of synthesizers has really made us open up to the possibilities of dissonant juxtaposition, so it's more the concept of what they're doing than the sound itself that's inspired us." She cites the unlikely triumvirate of Björk, the Moldy Peaches, and Dolly Parton as more immediately discernible influences, and it's hard to deny those claims after a listen to the band's EP, which is currently being sold at gigs.

These gigs display a versatility that most bands lack in their prime. Chairlift's six hands feverishly multi-task in order to take their songs to new places. So check out the evolution of one of New York's small wonders before the hipper-than-thou claim Chairlift for themselves.