Bent Knee blends a stew of styles

Divergent musical backgrounds and influences, when drawn together, often combust to yield an entirely new sound.

Thus is the music of Bent Knee, a Boston-based group of Berklee College of Music graduates that has been dubbed "ethereal" and "avant-garde." The musicians themselves prefer to say they operate without borders.

"In terms of philosophy and the dynamic, it's like a classic band," says lead singer and keyboard player Courtney Swain, who now lives in East Providence. "But we all come from such diverse backgrounds that we’re doing what is classic to each of us but it ends up being more of a mash-up. It’s like a six-headed chimera."

That, she explains, is basically a "hybrid element of all of us, with an element of pop."

Bent Knee’s latest album, "Land Animal," continues to reflect the rock, minimalist and art rock influences of its members — which include Ben Levin on guitar, Jessica Kion on bass, Chris Baum on violin and Gavin Wallace-Ailsworth on drums — while forging new ground sonically.

Swain’s wide-ranging vocals blend with powerful hooks and cushy melodies as they offer commentary on societal issues like racism and global warming. The heaviness, however, is balanced by a thread of hope and unity.

"This album is more of a shadow of the world around us, but that is what all music does. One of the awesome things to come out of the political turmoil these days is that a lot of creative music has been coming out," Swain says. "People have stepped on the gas in terms of writing stuff that is so self-exploratory and beautiful."

Life, she says, doesn’t have to be negative. On her personal journey, she has been trying to focus on the positive things around her, enjoying being in the moment. That is reflected, of course, in the band’s music, which she writes with Kion and Wallace-Ailsworth.

"Writing new music doesn’t have to be cathartic," she says, defining "cathartic" as heavy and sad. "It can just be awesome."

With a background in classical piano and heavily influenced by the female pop icons of 1990s Japan, where she spent part of her childhood, Swain points to the music of Ringo Shena as influential.

"I just loved the quirkiness of the songs. She’s weird and out there," she notes. "One of her albums was dark and morbid, almost Gothic, but there was a cathartic feel to them."

Bent Knee songs rely on such candor. The song "Being Human," for example, begins with the lyric "I imagine your dead body lying in my bed."

"It’s just false to consider that we never think about death, or someone else's death," she muses about the lyric. "That song has grown legs beyond the moment, although when people in the crowd start cheering, I find it weird."

Themes for their songs "come naturally from coping with day-to-day life." She’s been experimenting with writing from different perspectives to tell other people’s stories, although she feels odd taking credit for someone else's experience.

"Then the songs go through a lot of massaging back and forth with the arrangements to get the textures of how we will be playing as a band," she says. "It becomes all of us."

— Susan McDonald is a regular contributor to The Providence Journal. She can be reached at Sewsoo1@verizon.com.

If you go ...

What: Bent Knee

Where: Fête Music Hall, 103 Dike St., Providence

When: 8 p.m. Sunday, June 3

Tickets: $10

Information: (401) 383-1112, fetemusic.com