Baltimore's Best Hit Cakeshop Tonight

Though he strives to convey an abstract sense of spiritual power in his music, Arbouretum bandleader Dave Heumann understands the power of brittle guitar distortion too. On the Baltimore quartet’s 2007 sophomore album, Rites of Uncovering, Heumann is fond of gazing out onto the vast North African desert as imagined by authors Paul Bowles and Mohamed Mrabet in their works The Sheltering Sky and Love with a Few Hairs. Heumann describes the place he is trying to get to in the music as “awe in the face of something greater.” And while the band’s psychedelic, heavily Neil Young-influenced sound lends itself to the ethereal grandeur of Heumann’s ruminations and even evokes a kind of topography all its own, Heumann has obviously learned well from Neil Young’s rocking side. The band highlights its folk-rock and roots influences, and the hooks often go by at a slow, almost languid pace, but in concert the band brings a great deal more muscle to its presentation than it does on record. The combination of spiritual searching, rippling guitar psychedelia, and distortion that falls just short of brute force, imbue the music with an intensity that works on your senses not unlike a sweat ritual. For a show tonight at Cakeshop, Arbouretum appears with fellow psych-rockers and Thrill Jockey labelmates Pontiak, with whom the band just put out a split-LP.