August 4-10, 2005

musicpicks

John Wesley Harding's Love Hall Tryst

Singer-songwriter

If Charles Dickens hadn't been saddled with 10 kids, maybe he would have cherry-picked Bleak House for songs and formed a band to tour them. Thus unencumbered, John Wesley Harding beats Dickens in at least one respect. At more than 500 pages, his debut novel, Misfortune (released in April by Little, Brown under his given name, Wesley Stace) is a nasty, British, not-so-short tale of murder, obscene wealth and forced transsexuality in Victorian England. On the eve of publication, Harding gathered Kelly Hogan, Nora O'Connor and Brian Lohmann into a group called Love Hall Tryst to record an audio companion. Songs of Misfortune (Appleseed) doesn't stray too far from its source, but the 13-track disc stands on its own. The Love Hall Tryst marry traditional folk songs to Harding's originals with gleeful disregard for boundaries, and they reshape Leonard Cohen's "Joan of Arc" with beautiful four-part harmonies. The album is a mostly a cappella affair — only "Do Not Fear the Dark" and "Lord Bateman" are reprised as rockers — but the tour should exploit more of the foursome's talents. Catch them now, because the hugely pregnant O'Connor is about to pop.

Fri., Aug. 5, 8:30 p.m., $20, Tin Angel, 20 S. Second St., 215-928-0770, www.tinangel.com.

—M.J. Fine