Preview: Aloud at Cafe Prytania Tonight

Boston’s Aloud is appropriately enigmatic for a male/female-fronted rock band with a white, red, and black color scheme. Co-lead vocalists/guitarists Jen de la Osa and Henry Beguiristain have played together for the last 13 years, and despite this long-running relationship,  make no reference to  relations familial or romantic, only artistic. And though their rock is not so feedback blues-driven, Aloud’s musical energy does recall the White Stripes, if only there were two Jacks, no Meg.

Photo by Mick Murray

Photo by Mick Murray

Their most recent album, 2008’s Fan The Fury, features tracks that run the length of your average pop song, but despite their harmonies and at times anthemic choruses, the result is more reminiscent of the  hazy regret of the Wrens, than anything you’d hear on the radio. This is evident on “Hard Up in the 2000s” and “Sometimes I Feel Like a Vampire.”  The songs feature de la Osa’s and Beguiristain’s voices respectively, and despite the latter’s title, they’re not quite ready to cash in on the bloodsucking craze.

A question in that vein during a recent telephone interview prompted immediate laughter from the band, and a “Tell him the story, Henry” from de la Osa.

Beguiristain says, “We were playing an in-store at a Hot Topic in Fayetteville, and they were super-nice, I’m not trashing them, but we were literally standing in front of a display for Robert Pattinson T-shirts and New Moon. And it came to playing that song and I just thought, ‘Oh God.”’

The band is coming straight out of the studio onto tour, and where they’ve been looking to add refinement to their, at times, careening arrangements. Beguiristain says during a recent telephone interview, “We’ve been listening to a lot of Broken Social Scene and Feist and it’s starting to really influence our new stuff; it’s not so in your face. Every instrument has a reason being there.” Feist’s catalog is one more delicate than these rockers’; their upcoming show should showcase some of this four-piece’s attempts at finer orchestration.