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If you're looking for the go-to guy among the current crop of Avant Folk practitioners, a natural first choice would be the genre's barefoot poster boy, Devendra Banhart. A better selection would be Noah Georgeson, the producer and a performer behind recent works by Banhart, Joanna Newsom, Vetiver and Folk icon Bert Jansch. Georgeson's debut, Find Shelter, is a marvel of church-reverbed acoustic Folk and melancholy orchestrations, all set to the multitasker's archly weird yet completely accessible contemporary Folk tales. With a voice that blends the dark tones of Avant godfather Scott Walker and a less histrionic Rufus Wainwright, and a knack for morose arrangements that rivals Jack Nitzche and Brit Folk legend John Wood, Georgeson has fashioned a set of songs that draws on his dour Folk experience as well as his Classical/Flamenco training and his well-honed sense of cynical whimsy. Georgeson invests Find Shelter with a brilliant darkness that blankets the album with an inky pervasiveness that he occasionally punctures with pinholes of starshine, allowing wonder and dread to seep through in equal measure. Noah Georgeson proves to be a master of balancing light and dark, traditional and contemporary Folk and the sonic equivalents of pie-eyed optimism and reality-poisoned pessimism. (BB) Grade: B+
