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Freak folk, neo-folk, folk-rock—what ever happened straight-up folk, minus the hybrids and hyphens? You’ll find a heartening answer on “Devil Days,” the debut album by The Havens, a Brooklyn-based quartet whose original songs aren’t willowy journal entries set to finger-picked chords but true-blue slabs of old-time Americana, performed with an unabashedly twangy string-band sound that owes as much to the Weavers’ pristine harmonizing as to the Carter Family’s rough-hewn country warbling. Lest you find yourself lulled into nostalgia by this all-female group’s dulcet vocals and warm, bright acoustic sound, the lyrics will keep you on your toes. Songwriters Katie Blankenship, Rachael Benjamin, and Ami have a lot of fun painting contemporary urban pictures within the traditionalist frame: A pot seller is busted with a cheery yodel along the banks of the “Gowanus Canal,” and the sunny feminist anthem “I’ll Never Marry” contains a couplet you won’t hear at the Grand Ole Opry: “When I was a child, my mother said/Don’t get pregnant and please don’t wed.” Highlights include the jaunty fiddle tune “Workin Man,” the painfully intimate “Heart That’s Slowly Breaking,” and the full-throated lament “Garden Home,” which,like the best country or folk tunes, renders bittersweet themes in blazing primary colors. These are songs as likely to get you to sing along as to give you a lump in the throat.

The Havens: Devil Days - Review by Zubin Soleimany

'If, from the sight of them, you take the Havens as another, all-bespectacled, all-girl New York-country band, think again. Their uniform myopia aside, the Havens' original folk-country music incorporate whatever it needs stylistically and the band abides by an elastic sense of "traditional" music that gives their debut album, "Devil Days," a wide expressive range. From driving numbers like the Appalachian-rooted story-song, "Electricity" and first-wave feminist renunciation, "I'll Never Marry," which they sing with a scout troupe-like earnestness, the album grows deeper with more internal numbers like"The Brooklyn Waltz" and the haunting and tender ballad, "Twilight Song."

The album has a couple kinks, sure enough, but these are more than made up for by how simply enjoyable it is. And no song is more enjoyable than the original tune, "Gowanus Canal," an old-timey glorification of outer borough John Hardy types and their illicit doings around the Mississippi of the 718. By the time the first seemingly-Brooklynese "Yo!" actually breaks out into "del-ay-ee-hoo," you and your hipster friends will have been too seduced by their raucous energy and smart lyrics to care that you are, in fact, listening to yodeling.' This profile was pimped out at PimpWebpage.com

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