Music

Victoria meshes 'Gothic blues,' punk

Adia Victoria will play at White Water Tavern on Wednesday.
Adia Victoria will play at White Water Tavern on Wednesday.

There's a line in "Stuck in the South," from Adia Victoria's debut Beyond the Bloodhounds, that can stop you dead in your tracks.

"I don't know nothing 'bout Southern belles/but I can tell you 'bout Southern hell," she sings in the second verse.

Adia Victoria

Opening act: Joshua Asante

9 p.m. Wednesday, White Water Tavern, 2500 W. Seventh St., Little Rock

Admission: $10

(501) 375-8400

whitewatertavern.com

“Beyond the Blues: A Conversation With Adia Victoria”

5:30-6:30 p.m. Wednesday, Clinton School of Public Service, 1200 President Clinton Ave., Little Rock

Admission: Free

(501) 683-5200

clintonschool.uasys…

And this comes after an earlier mention of "swinging from that old palmetto tree." The song's spare, crippled blues come together in a hypnotic drone by the chorus, and when it's over you wonder what you've just heard. It's a powerful song of escape that somehow encapsulates several centuries' worth of American history in just over three minutes.

Victoria is casual when speaking of the track, which she and her band will play during their return Wednesday to the White Water Tavern. Little Rock's Joshua Asante will open the show.

"That song was written from my 17-year-old-self point of view," the 30-year-old says from her home in Nashville, Tenn. "It's a nice little moment midway through our set. It gets a little dark.''

Indeed. There is all sorts of darkness among the blues-inflected, Southern Gothic, countrified punk of Beyond the Bloodhounds, which was named for a line in Harriet Jacobs' 1861 autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. The album, released in May on Canvasback Music, landed on several 2016 best-of lists, including those of Rolling Stone and National Public Radio's Ann Powers.

"I was kinda shocked to see how many people could relate to the album," she says. "But I wasn't that shocked. It's not bad music."

Victoria grew up in the small town of Campobello, S.C., the middle child of six siblings. "We're all super tight," she says, adding that most of her family is in Nashville now.

She was drawn to '90s alt-rock and hip-hop -- Nirvana, Fiona Apple, Portishead, Hole, Talib Kweli and others -- although her household wasn't particularly musical.

"My mom liked Al Jarreau, Cream, Pat Metheny. My brothers, it was the mid-'90s, so we had Tupac and Biggie, and OutKast. I really liked OutKast when I was little, but they also scared me."

The first album Victoria ever bought was The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. "I was just in love with her."

But it was the blues that got the former ballet dancer making her own music when she was 21.

"I was living in Atlanta. I had a guitar a friend left me, and I started teaching myself how to play the blues," she says. "It's what I was listening to at the time, and I took a real liking to it. I liked the stories. They were interesting stories that were a lot more complex than what I noticed in contemporary music."

Before her White Water set, she will take part in "Beyond the Blues: A Conversation With Adia Victoria" at the Clinton School of Public Service. The free event is presented by the Clinton School, Oxford American magazine and the public radio program Beale Street Caravan.

Victoria, who spent time in Paris and majored in French at college, had planned to teach English in France, but ended up detouring into this music thing.

Still, she's putting her French to good use, recording an EP of her favorite French pop songs from the '60s. Expect to hear some of those Wednesday, but not any new compositions from the Bloodhounds followup.

"I'm not unveiling any stuff from the new album," she says, adding that writing for the project is going "just swimmingly, thank you."

Wednesday's show actually kicks off a three-week tour of the West Coast, but Victoria says she couldn't pass up a Little Rock stop.

"The White Water Tavern is one of our favorite venues," she says. "We love playing there."

Style on 02/14/2017

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