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Ear Candy: Lavender Diamond

Lavender Diamond's Becky Stark The band Lavender Diamond, led by Los Angeles-based triple-threat Becky Stark, releases their second record this week after a five-year sabbatical. Incorruptible Heart (Paracadute), produced by OK Go’s Damian Kulash, is...

by Nick Hallett

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The band Lavender Diamond, led by Los Angeles-based triple-threat Becky Stark, releases their second record this week after a five-year sabbatical. Incorruptible Heart (Paracadute), produced by OK Go’s Damian Kulash, is a stunning collection of achy, irresistible torch songs—none more typified than the first single, “Everybody’s Heart’s Breaking Now,” the video for which finds Stark twirling in slow motion, draped in diaphanous white tulle.

At the first of two New York shows to celebrate the release, the pixieish Stark appeared on the Mercury Lounge’s stage in a sparkly black cocktail dress and offered two songs in the self-described “business-casual” style of her debut—a kind of easy listening retro-folk—before launching into “All The Stars,” a spacious ballad from the new record that culminated in an ethereal, wordless descant that was both operatic and nicely reminiscent of Julee Cruise. Falling out of love is not a morose or cynical thing in Stark’s songs—just another way in which we engage with the universe. New Yorkers have one more chance to catch Lavender Diamond—on Saturday night at the Glasslands Gallery in Brooklyn—before the band finishes their tour in Boston the next evening at Brighton Music Hall.

Glasslands Gallery 289 Kent Ave., between South 1st and South 2nd Streets, Brooklyn glasslands.blogspot.com lavenderdiamond.net