Oh My God, Charlie Darwin by Low Anthem

Oh My God, Charlie Darwin, the Low Anthem's third album, was cut over ten days at the start of 2008 in a Block Island basement rigged up as a makeshift studio, then self-released that September before Bella Union and Nonesuch picked it up in June 2009. Founders Ben Knox Miller and Jeffrey Prystowsky had just brought Jocie Adams aboard, and Jesse Lauter co-produced. Its big idea is a head-on collision between Steinbeck's romantic confidence and Darwin's bleak survival math, with natural selection held up against politics, academia and faith.

The Providence band stuffed 27 instruments into the room, pump organ, zither and crotales among them, and wove blues, gospel, country, folk and R&B into their Americana. It opens hushed, on Miller's falsetto, blows up into racket, then sinks back into something solemn. Word of mouth carried it onto charts in Belgium, the Netherlands and the UK, and the Boston Music Awards named it Album of the Year.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.