The Nields are a five-piece band who you might call folk-rock if you were a marketer under the cowardly impression that everything must have a recognizable label or people will gather in the square at night and put it to the torch. Three of the five are Nields in person, as well. Katryna sings, Nerissa sings and plays guitar and writes most of the songs, and David plays guitar and writes the rest of them. David also provides a first-name link to drummer Dave Hower and bassist Dave Chalfant. Their back-catalog includes the 1994 album Bob on the Ceiling, which includes, among other things, a striking cover of Sinéad O'Connor's "Black Boys on Mopeds", and an EP and a live disc that I haven't heard yet because when I ordered them from the band's Web page I got a note back from their manager saying that they were out on tour and it might be a while.
Calling them folk-rock isn't accurate or evocative, but it's still probably the best place to begin. They use acoustic guitars frequently, and both Nields sisters (at least, I assume they're sisters) sing with fragile voices that sound like they'd be most at home in a small-college-town coffeehouse. And though there's plenty of overdriven electric guitar and loud drumming on this album, none of the Nields seem to have mastered the machismatic bluster with which rock drama is customarily executed. So if folk-rock is what you get when people raised on folk try to play rock, that's sort of what this is.
There's more to it, though, because the Nields' upbringing appears to have been a bit more complicated. Or perhaps everybody's upbringing is complicated, and the Nields just reflect more of theirs in their music than most people do. They remind me of Suddenly Tammy, not because the two bands play similar styles of music, but because the family is evident in the music. There's something fundamentally different about the music you get from four random individuals who gather in a basement to become a rock band, and the music you get from siblings and their assorted friends who play music as an extension of their lives together, and while I don't know anything about the real history here, if the Nields the band didn't evolve out of the Nields the people in this latter manner then this is a cunning imitation all the same.
The result is that the Nields have a large number of interesting elements that you would probably not have thought to include in a rock band constituted from scratch. Neither of the sisters' voices are that impressive on their own, but they play off each other instinctively, one soaring into wailing harmony while the other drops into a quiet, elfin confidence. One of them (or both perhaps, it's hard to tell) is fond of letting notes trail off into wild pitch modulation, and at other times they produce passing hints of a Polly Harvey-like whisper, Jean Smith's flat intonation, Sinéad O'Connor's tense circling and even the Beatles' psychedelic flourishes. David's electric guitars produce a range of sounds from a digeridu-like throaty drone to squeaky rhythm chords to a ragged-sounding lead that could easily be coming out of a cheap amp in the family rec room, and they combine this with the folkier acoustic guitars as if having both in a band at once is the most natural thing in the world. From: https://www.furia.com/page.cgi?type=twas&id=twas0060
