By Robert C. Knott

There is a growing buzz surrounding the Baltimore-based Thrushes. The self-described "dream pop" group, whose sound recalls The Jesus and Mary Chain, Sonic Youth, and The Velvet Underground, has deservingly garnered more than a few rave reviews for their debut full-length album, Sun Come Undone. The band is the focus of considerable and overwhelmingly positive online chatter as well.

When asked if Sun Come Undone is deserving of the praise, guitarist and vocalist Casey Harvey, with neither hesitation nor bravado, responds: "It definitely stands up. We have a very different aesthetic than other indie bands."

That aesthetic consists of simple, melodic songs—Harvey characterizes them as "lullabies"—wrapped in an ambient, feedback- and reverb-saturated wall of sound. The Phil Spector allusion is apt; Thrushes claim The Ronettes and The Shangri-Las, girl bands the studio Svengali all but invented, as their foremost musical influences.

Despite the meticulous sleight of hand implied by such influences, Thrushes are not a product of the studio. Not only was Sun Come Undone recorded in a mere day and a half, much of which was consumed with setting up the band's gear to achieve the desired sound, but the album is largely devoid of overdubs.

During a recent performance at the Ottobar, Harvey—along with lead vocalist and guitarist Anna Conner, bassist Rachel Tracy, and drummer Matt Davis—demonstrated that their music is best consumed live. The band's spirited, if brief, set included such Sun Come Undone standouts as "Ghost Train," "Wake Up," and "Aidan Quinn."

An outing that could have been compromised by the venue's muddied mix was offset by a band that, cliché notwithstanding, is clearly greater than the sum of its parts. Save for Davis, who is Thrushes' bedrock, no member of the band is a particularly gifted musician. And therein lies their charm: This is an ensemble whose members are in absolute creative lockstep with one another.

Following their performance, the band retired to the Ottobar's upstairs bar where they continued to exude the energy they had created onstage. There they sat in a small hometown club seemingly indifferent to the bigger and better things that Sun Come Undone portends. As a photographer rattled off a series of promotional shots, the band members leaned naturally into one another, utterly content in the moment.

By Sarah Tanguy

If when you hear "modernism" you think "cold concrete," an ambitious show at the Corcoran will be a revelation. A rare and sexy automobile —the Czech 1938 Tatra T77a—greets visitors in the lobby, while rows of reproductions of Dutch designer Gerrit Rietveld's 1923 Red Blue Chair flank the museum's grand staircase (the original chair can be seen inside the gallery). With encyclopedic breadth, "Modernism: Designing a New World, 1914–1939" explores these concurrent movements that sought to positively rebuild the world for the masses after the terror of World War I. A whirlwind of more than four hundred high-impact pieces of art, design, and architecture brings to life the key themes of the era: utopia, the machine, and the natural world. In contrast to today's art market that gives excessive attention to money and status, this show boldly proclaims a more democratic role for the arts, and evokes modernism's ambivalent legacy: We can still enjoy Finn designer Alvar Aalto's 1936 Savoy wavy glass vase, but the ultraviolet sun lamp, manufactured in 1928 by Hanovia, is a poignant indicator of the utopian dream gone bad.

—Sarah Tanguy is an independent curator and critic based in Washington, D.C.

By Dan Gudgel

Too often, contemporary poetry can seem like a withered grammarian, lecturing for the benefit of the words rather than the good of the audience. Reading poet Adrienne Su's 2006 collection, Sanctuary, felt like the coffee conversation after the lecture: more interesting, more honest, and in the end, more satisfying. Su doesn't flinch from illuminating her own struggles, as in "Bargain" when she makes "the trade / Of what looks like less punishment for what looks like less living." In direct, precise language—which makes me glad she's teaching future writers at Pennsylvania's Dickinson College—Su picks at stereotypes and assumptions of femininity, motherhood, and her own Chinese-American culture. The poems speak openly of the doubts, revelations, and joys of being both a part of America and apart from it. And throughout, Su points at the humor inherent in life's trials. One poem, "Female Infanticide: A Guide for Mothers," is both hilarious for its brazenness, and horrible for its truth. Sanctuary is a rare and worthy book that charms while it bites.

—Dan Gudgel has a master of arts degree in writing from Nottingham-Trent University.

LITERATURE

By Susan McCallum-Smith

One summer day in a June long ago, my father took a photograph of me sitting on my elder sister's lap. Our siblinghood is undeniable, not because of the matching gingham outfits and matching feet dangling hen-toed in waterproof plastic sandals, but because of something intangible yet identical in our expressions.

The bond between sisters is a combustible brew laced with rivalry, love, emulation, and resentment, making it a favorite ingredient when concocting a detective yarn. In Kate Atkinson's 2004 Case Histories, Julia and Amelia Land ask Jackson, a laconic flatfoot, to try to discover what happened to their younger sister who disappeared more than thirty years before. Indeed, many people disappear in this book, both literally and emotionally, conveying the fragility of life. "That was how you lost people," writes Atkinson, "a little carelessness and they just slipped through your fingers." There is something peculiarly British in Atkinson's tone—a comic common sense—which allows her to navigate some unsavory subject matter including murdered children, incest, and maternal fury. One young girl, who was spared the molestation suffered by her sisters at the hands of their father, matures into a woman who feels, shockingly, not blessed by her fortunate escape, but bitterly envious and sexually unattractive. "He never interfered," she pouts, in a tone akin to regret, revealing both her lack of self-worth and the author's coal-black humor.

If you prefer your sibling mysteries more gothic in nature, try Diane Setterfield's 2006 debut, The Thirteenth Tale, which has the added perk of being a book about books and boasts a plethora of sisters—and sisters of the spookiest form. Some people find clowns creepy, others are scared witless by Tom Cruise, whereas it's twins that give me the heebie-jeebies. Don't be put off by The Thirteenth Tale's cheesy cover and aggressive hype; Setterfield's intricate plot is lovingly indebted to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and rendered in prose teetering pleasantly close to purple. Margaret Lea, an introspective biographer haunted by her dead twin sister, is commissioned to write the life story of an elusive best-selling novelist. Lea moves into Vida Winter's ancestral pile (never go into the attic!) and begins to peel back layers of the Winter family's history, including a fatal fire, insanity, and sibling complications. Identical children emerge with a frequency not seen since The Village of the Damned.

I assume Setterfield is working on her follow-up; maybe she should quit while she's ahead. Laura Lippman, on the other hand, need have no fear of the page when she sits down (as she probably has already) to write her next novel. I have a confession to make; I haven't read a book by Lippman for many years, and the excellent What the Dead Know taunts me that my reading time could have been better spent.

Two young sisters disappear on Easter weekend in 1975 from a mall in Baltimore, leaving behind a stunned community, shattered marriages, and a police detective haunted by his failure to solve the most important case of his career. More than twenty years later, a woman arrested after a car accident claims to be one of the missing girls, yet despite her intimate knowledge of all the facts of the case, her behavior is erratic and devious, leaving the police to question her identity and motivations.

Even more impressive than Lippman's ability to reel a reader in is her canny understanding of human nature. Her characterizations of the missing girls capture the simultaneously obnoxious and vulnerable nature of many teenagers, as the sisters sneak around manipulating each other's emotions and jostling for parental affection. Lippman also skewers the failure of most of us to offer more than pat, shallow condolences to those who, like the girls' mother, Miriam, have endured an unspeakable ordeal: 

"People tried on Miriam's pain … modeled it for her, almost as if they expected her to be flattered by their interest. But they never had any trouble shedding it when the time came. They plucked it off and handed it back to her, continuing with their blessedly uneventful lives."

This latest novel places Lippman firmly in the company of P. D. James and Ian Rankin, whose similarly accomplished novels are often not given serious literary consideration due to their marginalization as "genre" fiction. Though, frankly, dear reader, I don't imagine Ms. Lippman gives a damn.

—Susan McCallum-Smith is Urbanite's literary editor.