Lovers – Dark Light

Loud and proud, Portland, OR based Lovers is a band of emotional intensity and complexity. Their new album Dark Light begins with singer Carolyn Berk’s confession, “every time the music starts, I can feel my aching, shaking heart,” and from there, Lovers embark on a spiritual journey of inspired three-part harmonies, deep introspection, and next-wave humor.
Since 2001 songwriter Carolyn Berk has established her unique voice as Lovers with four acclaimed, haunted and heart-broken previous albums. Lovers (celebrated lyricist Berk, synth-programmer and performance artist Kerby Ferris, and sequencer and percussionist Emily Kingan) craft an intimate portrait of female friendship, sexuality, and evolution as an infinite process.

The three first encountered in 2002 after Berk’s near-fatal van explosion while on tour with an earlier incarnation of the band. Emily Kingan, then on tour with classic Portland feminist hardcore band The Haggard, invited Berk to join the bill. Ferris was their roadie. Years later, Kingan organized a meeting for her two friends and future band-mates in South America, where Berk was travelling and Ferris was living at the time, performing in various experimental electronic projects in São Paulo’s thriving music scene. The result was sisterly love at second site, and prophetic premonitions of the creative collaborations to come.

Says Berk about Lovers presently: “We are like sisters. We are sisters.”

Dark Light, recorded at Portland’s beloved Type Foundry studio with Badman label owner Dylan Magierek (Mark Kozelek, Thao Nguyen & Portland Cello Project, Starfucker) is the first for Berk, Ferris and Kingan together. Says Portland’s Willamette Week, the new record marks “a change in Lovers philosophy that takes the band from being a singer-songwriter’s outlet to a full-on synth-driven pop group, and it does so masterfully.” The result is an expansive sonic landscape of colorful wonder and hope, and an interactive and engaging performance that strives to leave audiences inspired.

“Carolyn Berk’s songs are full of breathless melancholy and a sinking, infinite sadness. In them you hear hints of the circus-fuineral magic-realist run-on folk song of Neutral Milk Hotel, the dreamy twilight grandeur of Mazzy Star, Bright Eyes’ last-gasp soliloquies, and the ghost-haunted majesty of Magnetic Fields’ loneliest highways. ButI’ll be damned if Berk isn’t a more entrancing spell-caster that any of them.” – The Boston Phoenix