In deep waters with River Whyless

Aug. 26—details

—River Whyless

—Presented by AMP Concerts

—7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 31

—The Bridge at Santa Fe Brewing Company, 37 Fire Place

—Tickets are $30; 505-886-1251,available at tickets.holdmyticket.com; santafebrewing.com

Jangling guitars start off slow and steady, setting a mellow tone for the eclectic folk number "Michigan Cherry." The lyrics come in smooth as members of River Whyless croon in harmony, singing about love, intimacy, and passion with delicacy and respect for its mysteries. And it's catchy too.

Tart and sweet like a wild berry

Tart and sweet your words to me

Dark and red like a Michigan cherry

Dark and red as the Iliad sea

Note the reference to The Iliad and, in a later stanza, they follow with another reference to Greek mythology: Homer's Odyssey. The mellifluous, soulful, and, at times, haunting tones of River Whyless' latest release, Monoflora, is infused with allusions to works of literature. The lyrics have a lot to unpack, but aren't complicated, just well crafted.

"We've been working together for a long time at this point," says River Whyless vocalist and guitarist Ryan O'Keefe. "We're a very close-knit group of people, and we all come from various writing backgrounds."

River Whyless appears live at The Bridge at Santa Fe Brewing Company at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Aug. 31, with Colorado-based quintet Yonder Mountain String Band.

All the members of River Whyless — O'Keefe, Halli Anderson on violin, Daniel Shearin on bass and harmonium, and Alex McWalters on drums — contribute to the songwriting. But the harmonizing of the three vocalists — Anderson, O'Keefe, and Shearin — often acts as a single voice, although they trade off on lead vocals.

"A lot of people think 'Oh, this is a Ryan song,' because I'm the one singing it, but that's not really the case," O'Keefe says. "If I'm singing it, it doesn't mean it was written by me. They're all written by everybody. Alex has an MFA in creative writing, and he's a poet and has written a book, so he's always contributing in the lyrical sense. And then Daniel was a songwriter on his own before joining. So we've always been a group of songwriters. There was really no other way to do it, because everybody was always bringing in songs."

The band formed in 2012, after the members graduated from North Carolina's Appalachian State University (where they met) and settled in the Asheville, North Carolina, area. O'Keefe and Anderson were the first to collaborate, writing songs together, and were later joined by McWalters, then Shearin. They released their first studio album, A Stone, a Leaf, an Unfound Door later that same year.

"I basically learned how to play the guitar to be in this band," O'Keefe says. "There isn't, like, 20 years of me playing guitar since high school and things like that. So there's a simplicity to our first record. There's also an optimistic reach that produced some sprawling folk tunes."

Since its founding, the band's lineup hasn't changed. But for Monoflora, their fourth LP, they did away with a producer in order to release the album independently for the purpose of maintaining complete creative control.

Shearin, a recording engineer, provided the gear, and the band converted McWalters' house into a homemade recording space, replete with a control room in the basement. The high ceilings of the main floor, where the band played, contributed to the album's vaulted, echoing tones. It's a recording with space around it, like what you'd hear in a folk ballad from the 1960s. It's an unmistakable, nostalgic sound that's a throwback to an earlier era but not a throwback to an earlier version of River Whyless. The band's evolved.

"Michigan Cherry," the album's 9th track, is evocative in the way of Yusuf/Cat Stevens' "My Lady D'Arbanville." And while NPR Music, which hosted a Tiny Desk Concert for the band in 2016 (youtu.be/Iyzf1EKNyno), drew a passing comparison to American singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson, their sound is also reminiscent of The Mamas & the Papas by way of Fleetwood Mac, or something a little more contemporary, like Fleet Foxes.

"There are definitely some traditions that influence us all," O'Keefe says. "It's pretty clear that the songwriters of old influence us. We approach our songs as singer-songwriter songs first and foremost. You can imagine, it's a little bit of Crosby, Stills, & Nash, Joni Mitchell, definitely Paul Simon."

Like Nilsson, who was known for incorporating Caribbean sounds into his music, River Whyless looks beyond the regional Appalachian-infused folk music of the Carolinas.

"One of the things that's influenced us most in the last few years is a genre called Tuareg, which is North African. It's basically considered desert blues."

Monoflora, O'Keefe says, contains a lot of timing and beats based on the rhythms of Tuareg.

The coronavirus pandemic kept the band from touring in support of the album (until now), but that gave them a chance to entirely remix it twice before release.

"It was kind of frustrating to have a project that's lingering, and you just want to wrap it up," O'Keefe says.

River Whyless is a tonic, even if some of their songs are about pain and loss; they invest them with a deep sense of empathy. But the lilting harmonies and melodies are often contrasted by lyrics that speak of heartache and despair.

"Come back, back from, back from the city," they sing in the fourth track, "Mourning Dove," a heart-wrenching song of familial longing.

Dry out your mind I'm all that you have left

Daddy was a mourning dove born to be away

His body hurt in spite of the medicine he made this time

To hold off the outside

Despite "Mourning Dove's" references to alcohol or drug use to keep the world at bay, one can't help but latch onto that last line but for an entirely different reason.

River Whyless holds off the outside.