Indie artists' tour ends in fine form

"It's a good night, and a little sad, like always at the end of something," said Anna Ternheim during her 30-minute opening set at Johnny Brenda's on Saturday.

It was the last show of a 21/2-week tour with fellow Swedes Loney Dear and New York's Asobi Seksu.

As the night progressed, lyrics and meaning gradually ceded to pure melody and sound. Ternheim's careful precision led to Loney Dear's contrapuntal harmonies, which led to Asobi Seksu's waves of distortion, and voices soared higher as words grew less distinct.

Like Suzanne Vega, Ternheim sings in a vibratoless alto; her cool restraint and clarity contrast with the emotional turmoil coursing through the lyrics.

Drawn mostly from the new album Leaving on a Mayday, her songs told of wrenching partings (of lovers, of kidnapped children) and rainy days. As an end-of-tour treat, Loney Dear leader Emil Svanängen sat in on guitar for part of her set, joining his bandmates, who had backed her throughout the tour, and she returned the favor for his set.

On his Loney Dear albums, Svanängen is basically a one-man band, and his densely layered chamber pop has an appealing remoteness and subtlety. Joined by his four-piece band plus vocalist Ternheim, however, the songs become propulsive exercises in textures and voices.

Svanängen strummed his acoustic guitar hard enough to break strings, and his remarkable falsetto soared on pillows of la-la-las and oh-ohs, sometimes provided by the audience, and lots of trebly percussion - tambourines, xylophones, bells, and (sampled) whistling. Beautiful.

Asobi Seksu revisits its catalog for a pretty acoustic album, Rewolf, due next month, but the dream-pop quartet's set ignored that approach in favor of walls of electric sound behind Yuki Chikudate's celestial soprano. Singing in English and Japanese, Chikudate's voice cut through James Hanna's My Bloody Valentine-style sheets of guitar.

The atmospheric songs from this year's Hush often led to crashing climaxes, as did the set itself, which ended with the diminutive Chikudate taking over the drum kit for a thrashing solo that became engulfed in guitar feedback of pure, visceral sound.

It was a good night, and not at all sad.