Taken By Trees

Sun., Feb. 14, 8 p.m., $15-$18, with El Perro Del Mar, World Café Live, 3025 Walnut St., 215-222-1400, worldcafelive.com.

by K. Ross Hoffman

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Published: Feb 9, 2010

rock/pop

Since abandoning her post as frontwoman for The Concretes in 2006, Victoria Bergsman has busied herself into quite a valuable node for your six-degrees-of-indie-separation games: singing backups for Camera Obscura and Primal Scream, getting remixed by The Tough Alliance, covering Arthur Russell (on a Jens Lekman-curated EP) and Guns N' Roses, and, most notably, starring as "cutesy teenybopper #2" in Peter Bjorn and John's worldwide smash "Young Folks (That Whistling Song)." For last year's East of Eden (Rough Trade), her second album under the Taken by Trees moniker, Bergsman enlisted a different set of collaborators entirely, traveling to Pakistan and working primarily with Sufi musicians, who infuse her sweet, gently melancholic compositions with dholak, tabla, flute, harmonium and spine-tingling qawwali vocals. The resulting album, a stunningly lovely mixture of field recording, Eastern devotional music and low-key Western folk-pop (besides Bergsman's own numbers, there's an Animal Collective cover, a Swedish-translated Herman Hesse poem and a traditional Pakistani piece), offers a subdued but striking new slant on the recently rampant strains of indie-music globalization.

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