Thao Nguyen & the Get Down Stay Down are at the Black Cat tonight. Photo by Tarina Westlund, courtesy Kill Rock Stars. By DCist Contributor Adam Mazmanian
Tonight’s Black Cat show will be a homecoming of sorts for Thao Nguyen. The 25-year-old singer-songwriter was born and raised in Falls Church, but by her own admission, she was too busy with college at William & Mary, and maybe “not well connected enough” to get very involved in the D.C. music scene. Now living in San Francisco and signed to prominent indie label Kill Rock Stars, Nguyen doesn’t have to spend a lot of time playing clubs in the Bay Area trying to make it. She says that her band is “always on tour,” and when she’s home, “We prefer not to be in a club. It reminds me of work.”
To go by Nguyen’s songs, this is just the kind of downbeat, self-deprecating remark you’d expect. She sings about disappointment, detachment and, as she puts it, “all kinds of dissatisfied, frenzied feelings” in a remarkably cheery way. She sings in halting, rhythmic bursts that recall the style of Isaac Brock of Modest Mouse or Cameron Bird of Architecture in Helsinki. Her vocals frequently drive the tempo of her songs, creating a kind of electric tension that can explode in a barrage of hand-clapping, or relax into a funky horn part.
Thao is currently touring, along with her band, the Get Down Stay Down, in support of Know Better, Learn Faster, their second full-length album for Kill Rock Stars. The title, Nguyen says, reflects a lot of what you’ll find in her lyrics: a tongue-in-cheek take about how wisdom typically arrives just after it is needed most. “That’s what a lot of it is about,” she said. “Urgency, but also this resignation that it is too late.”
Two songs on the new album stand out. “When We Swam” gets my vote as the best indie single of the year. It’s a hybrid of psychedelic folk and doo-wop that features a wistful yet sultry Nguyen picking over the remains of a doomed relationship. The closely-observed and catchy “Body” covers basically the same psychic turf, but from a slightly different vantage. Nguyen expresses the song’s core ambivalence by alternating between a sexy, growling whisper and angry, plaintive shouts.
