Pop/Rock/Indie - It's no surprise, actually, to learn that Boston's Mean Creek began as the folk busking duo of Chris Keene and Aurore Ounjian. Listening to tracks from their fine upcoming October 13 album The Sky (Or the Underground) is like hearing skeletal folk tracks with more muscular rhythm section additions fleshing things out with a serrated, indie-rock edge. Described by the hometown Boston Globe as "gloriously melancholic", Mean Creek (the name taken from an indie film, not some pseudo-Americana reference) have made their big Sky a formidable and satisfying listen. Flush with aching harmonies and the angular guitar riffs and slightly discordant harmonies that walk that fine line between alt and alt-country, the band simply and unassumingly stake out their own distinctive musical territory.

 And it all comes, not so neatly, of course, back to the acoustic beginnings -- the core of songs such as the lock-step folk/rock jangle "It's Good To Be Back Again" or the more rough-hewn, folk-meets-grunge, ominously majestic title track, an anguished pop track dressed in black mourning clothes. “You throw on one little harmonica part and all of a sudden you’re an ‘Americana’ band,’’ Ounjian tells The Globe with a wry smile. "I think of us as a rock band." Lyrically astute, musically a mix of alt bluster and blistering, decidedly un-mellow folk/pop shards, the vast reaches and solid craftsmanship of The Sky is, well, heaven sent. Recommended.

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Mean Creek - "The Sky (Or the Underground)"  (from the album The Sky (Or The Underground)

Mean Creek - "It's Good to Be Back Again"  (from the album The Sky (Or The Underground)