High Tea went looking for a way to represent the themes of new album “The Wick and The Flame” that felt artistic and off kilter. The folk-roots-indie duo decided to set a dollhouse ablaze.
“We ended up lighting this dollhouse on fire for the cover art,” singer-guitarist Isabella DeHerdt told the Herald. “But before we lit it on fire, we decorated it. We put fake moss on it. We covered it in glitter. We painted it. We put pinecones on it. We put in TLC before burning it down.”
“It felt like an apt metaphor for creation and music and life,” DeHerdt added. “You create something and then you have to let it go.”
“The Wick and The Flame” starts off with a tender, introspective tune about staring into the void. The Western Mass-based duo’s second LP rolls on with angry blues stomps and furious love songs and gentle ballads of survival. So, yeah, creation and music and life feels about right.
DeHerdt and singer-percussionist Isaac Eliot struck up a friendship at a Berklee College of Music summer program in 2015, but it took the pandemic to push them together into High Tea. Both played music separately, but living together, they took advantage of time and proximity to put together a duo devoted to exploring intimate, dynamic music.
“We went into our first album not knowing if it would be a one-off project or if we’d ever perform live,” DeHerdt said ahead of a May 5 Club Passim show with Rachel Baiman.
But the two quickly realized how well they sang, played, wrote, recorded and performed together.
“Isaac’s brain is one of the most harmony-centric brains I’ve ever had the privilege of knowing,” DeHerdt said. “He can hear a line and sing something that fits so perfectly with it in seconds.”
Eliot countered: “Isabella will play guitar in a way that makes me feel like her brain isn’t in her head, it’s in the guitar. She’ll jam and run with an idea and, every time through, the phrase will be a little more defined, a little more intentionally delivered, a little more sharply executed.”
Listening to “The Wick and The Flame,” it’s easy to agree with their assessment of one another. “Wine” starts off with this tangle of notes that evokes Delta blues, Celtic folk and roots rock all at once. Over the guitar line, their voices cry with high harmonies, twisted vocal counterpoints. The pair tap into a similar chemistry on “To Be Alive,” and “Crash,” and “The Tale of Billy & the Void.” But each song toys with hushed patience and wild crescendos in new ways.
“I love asking the question of, ‘How can we push this further in one direction?’,” Eliot said. “There’s a point when you think, ‘This is as quiet as I can go.’ Then you reconsider the quietness, the layers, how you’re delivering what you’re saying, the spaces between what you are saying.”
The band has mastered release and restraint. Even if restraint isn’t exactly what you would expect from a band that lights a dollhouse on fire for its cover art.
For music and more tour dates, visit highteaband.com.