A Hawk and A Hacksaw

Part of me foretold the Neutral Milk Hotel reunion.

The intimacy of his delicate and intricate songs has the crowd gripped with the spell broken only briefly by an ill-timed fire alarm.

Last year Jeremy Barnes and Heather Trost were joined by Balazs Ungar on cimbalom a type of hammered dulcimer.

Since then Jeremy Barnes and Heather Trost have hooked up with Hungary’s Hun Hangar Ensemble for their own headline shows and released a second album.

At some indefinable point during A Hawk And A Hacksaw’s set, Heather Trost’s violin starts to make the self-same sound as a nest of peeved wasps.

Established in the early 2000’s by Jeremy Barnes (formerly the drummer for cult group Neutral Milk Hotel), and now featuring Heather Trost, A Hawk and a Hacksaw take a currently uniquely traditional approach to representing the melodies and rhythms of Balkan, Turkic and/or formerly-Soviet Europe. They eschew

The Rivoli on September 22, 2011