Drew Grow and the Pastors' Wives Sanctify Columbia City [Photo Gallery]

After taking a tour of Columbia City Theater I was itching to hear a band in there, and Abbey told me something called Drew Grow and the Pastors' Wives [Facebook] would be more than worth the trip. They're the eponymous Drew Grow (lead vocals, guitar), Cookie (percussion), Kris Doty (upright bass), and Seth Schaper (keyboards), from Portland, Oregon.

Sound on the Sound has been singing their praises locally, and Seattle Weekly has joined the choir--describing a performance as one of those "rare, game-changing live music experiences, the kind when you're watching a band and your chest swells up big and red and raw like a great frigatebird during mating season...."

I can hardly make my balky fingers type the description of their music, which is: indie folk-rock fired up by gospel and soul. (Try to imagine a Decemberists air floating out of an AME church, I dare you.) It's unusual, is all. But "It All Comes Right" (off their latest album) comes complete with a soul chorus that the 200-odd souls at Columbia City Theater on Saturday night joined into with uninhibited fervency.

White people! They will surprise you. It had been like that all night. Not only did everyone know the words to all the songs, but they wanted to howl them back to the stage with equal intensity--except during Grow's solo, "Premonition," which, thanks to firm shushing from back of the room, was free even of bar-fueled chatter. From three or four feet away, Grow sang at the microphone, rather than into it, and the evening became less a musical performance than an incarnation of longing.

Newly initiated, I can't speak comprehensively, but what I heard most was something akin to Augustine's outcry that "Thou movest us to delight in praising Thee; for Thou hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee."

Grow's lyrical impulse often locates itself in that troubling space between the lover and the beloved--he yells out "I Want You To Come Home Now" as if volume could overcome not just the physical distance, but an emotional separation, too. Even in the musical equivalent of cuddling up against a lonely night, soothed for the moment, there's the realization that a relationship is not adequate to the need. And then, from out of that visceral bed an ache flowers in the heart, and Grow's voice rises--not to the soul falsetto, but in literal volume, expanding to fill the room with its abrasions.