Efterklang

The music made by the mad Danes in Efterklang on their most recent recording, 2007's Parades, invokes venerable imagery: hooded monks, cherubic sprites, uncorrupted angels and post-Renaissance composers dedicated to going for baroque. Tracks such as "Polygyne" and "Frida Found a Friend" are overstuffed with aural elements, ranging from sprawling string and brass sections to background vocalists transformed by studio tweaking into veritable choirs sonorous enough to grace a Gothic cathedral. On the players' current club tour, which includes a local stop in the company of Peter Broderick and Vitamins, they won't have a cast of thousands to assist them, as they do on disc. But the strength of their arrangements, the starkness of their lyrics — many of which are delivered in English — and the idiosyncratic nature of their artistic vision (which multi-instrumentalist Rasmus Stolberg describes in a Q&A accessible at blogs.westword.com/backbeat) should make for a memorable evening anyway. Their work finds the weirdness in beauty, and vice versa.