YOU WON’T
FRIDAY, MAY 20
CAT’S CRADLE BACK ROOM, CARRBORO
8:30 p.m.
$10–$12,
When the Boston duo You Won’t takes the stage, the instruments outnumber the personnel several times. There’s guitar and drums, a singing saw, harmonium, wind chimes, a whirly tube, a bass ukulele, and so on. Watching Josh Arnoudse and Raky Sastri conjure so many sounds is fun, sure, but their real strength comes from cunning songcraft, where seemingly breezy tunes sport latent emotional intensity. This is especially true on April’s Revolutionaries, the more ambitious and focused follow-up to 2012’s Skeptic Goodbye.
These moments come through in slower songs like “Trampoline,” where a singing saw warbles as Arnoudse confesses “I don’t know ’bout you and me” and ruminates on heartbreak. On “Little Lion,” Arnoudse gets graphic. “So what good have you done with your moral marauding?/Your dogs are all dead and their corpses are rotting,” he sings. Among these rough-and-tumble pop songs, it’s one of several jarring moments.
Even as You Won’t digs deep, the instrumentation remains buoyant, especially during tracks such as “No Divide,” “Ya Ya Ya,” and “1-4-5.” These bright songs trade in familiar uncertainties, insecurities, and other assorted anxieties. “Douchey” a bouncy number about overcoming one’s, yes, youthful “douchiness”is a tad silly, but its cheekiness is at least honest. Rather than brooding over black clouds of emotion, You Won’t revels in them, less cursing the storm than celebrating in its rain. Sumner James and Jocelyn McKenzie open.
