The vocalists for this Hartford, Wis., group, Justin Jablonski and Wesley Columbia, don’t exactly sing the prettiest, but the duo’s rough-hewn vocalizing manages to seem both resolutely grounded and nearly abjectly forlorn. Occasional wafts of waterbird sounds and one song’s nearly random-sounding spoken word prologue mesh with mostly unplugged instrumentation and the Voyagers’ singing to create a sound at once experimental and ancient.
The thoughtful strangeness of it all puts the lie to the notion that acoustic music creativity is an urban phenomenon nowadays. On their way to mastering a style diverse enough in appeal and influences for them to play an avant-garde performance space, a rock club and a coffee house in the course of a weekend, Fare Forward Voyagers explore an intriguingly singular sonic terrain.
