- Julien Bourgeois
- My Brightest Diamond’s Shara Worden
On the latest album from My Brightest Diamond, This is My Hand (Asthmatic Kitty), the group’s charismatic, mysterious leader Shara Worden injects her brand of art-pop with a serious rhythmic bump, complementing the band’s typically sophisticated arrangements with muscular, hard-hitting grooves. As usual, the core arrangements are built around layers of horns and strings, often delivering pulsing, minimalist patterns derived from contemporary classical music—several members of the new-music group yMusic, who collaborated with Worden on the previous MBD album All Things Will Unwind, reprise their roles here. But as you can hear from today’s 12 O’Clock Track, “Lover Killer,” those contrapuntal lines are girded by fat, brassy horn stabs and a strutting 70s-funk groove, especially on the song’s final section, when the bass lines of Brian Wolfe flex a thick skin of distortion. Worden has spent years refining her delicate singing, which can sound ethereal and forceful at once, and she never has any problem with the fierce sounds percolating behind her. In the group’s first local show since the new album was released, My Brightest Diamond headlines Lincoln Hall on Thursday evening.