Fri 2/21 @ 8PM
Northeast Ohio’s Shivering Timbers can stand eye-to-eye with any nationally acclaimed act in the elastic “Americana” genre. The Akron trio brings so much forceful clarity to their stew of influences that writers grope for descriptives, coming up with things as hilarious as the one the band uses in its promotion, “Neko Case channels Patsy Cline while the Bad Seeds channel the Replacements.”
Not that they really sound like that. It’s really just a fancy way of saying that Sarah Benn has an expressive, country-influenced voice and the band has a lot of energy for a semi-acoustic three-piece.
Tall, striking singer/upright bassist Benn is clearly the group’s focus, tipping her instrument and shaking her hair while crisply belting an uptempo tune or crooning a ballad. Her husband Jayson shapes the tunes with his deft guitar, while drummer Daniel Kshywonis maintains the momentum.
Shivering Timbers released their first album We All Started in the Same Place in 2010. The fact that Black Keys’ guitarist Dan Auerbach took them under his wing and they recorded it at then-Akron studio merited them a little buzz. But they really came into their own with 2012’s Sing Sing, which displayed the lovely tonal and emotional colors in their music, which dips into rock, folk, blues, country, and even a wee bit of jazz, as the music dictates.
They landed showcases last year at the country’s premier music conference Austin’s SXSW, and they’re currently working on new music, which should build an even bigger buzz for this rapidly improving band. This spring, they’ll be heading out for a tour of the southeast — Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama — and their always-packed summer festival schedule is starting to fill out.
Meanwhile, you can see them headline at the Kent Stage, where they’ll be performing with two other Akron bands, the White Pines and the Singular.
Tickets are $8.
thekentstage.com/shivering-timbers
Photo by Jeremy Aronhalt
Kent, OH 44240