The highs of Low Anthem

From left: Ben Miller, Jeffrey Prystowsky, and Jocie Adams of the Low Anthem (Justine Hunt/Globe Staff)

CAMBRIDGE - Right down to its name, the Low Anthem embraces contrast, paradox, and contradiction. As intimate and spare as it sounds, for instance, the trio's soon-to-be-released second full-length album, "Oh My God, Charlie Darwin," features no fewer than 27 instruments: pump organ, zither, banjo. You name it, it's probably on there.

The subject matter of the songs, band members say, represents an attempt to grapple with the seemingly mutually exclusive impulses of community and competition: the human need for inclusion and acceptance pitted against a Darwinian drive that champions the survival of the fittest. If that idea sounds ambitious, it's because it is.

How three musicians from such a small state (Rhode Island), all in their early 20s, can make such a big noise that sounds wise well beyond their years, is perhaps the Low Anthem's greatest dichotomy.

"It's hard to listen to right now," singer-multi-instrumentalist Ben Miller says of his group's forthcoming album. "But I'll take a break and then go back and figure out what it's about."

Miller, who's talking with his bandmates Jeffrey Prystowsky and Jocie Adams over beers at Toad in Porter Square, claims confusion even though he's capably explaining - in great detail, no less - the themes behind the band's new collection of superbly crafted, grandly eloquent songs. The album begins and ends with a pair of beauties: the falsetto-sung "Charlie Darwin" and the gently striking "To Ohio (Reprise)." They're tracks that, in bookending the collection, are supremely haunted mood pieces that set and then reiterate a magnificently eclectic tone.

The members of the Low Anthem, which has shifted in number over the years and is about to add a fourth member (drummer Cyrus Scofield), regard themselves as a contemporary folk band. But the breadth of their heady influences - we hear hints of Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, Grant-Lee Phillips, the Scud Mountain Boys - traverses much broader stylistic ground than one genre can encapsulate. Miller calls their shows "bipolar."

No wonder they've opened for both folk legend Richard Thompson and punk icon Thurston Moore. When we talk, they've just returned from performing in front of about 2,000 people at the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival near the Berkshire mountains in New York. Now the band is kicking off its most extensive undertaking yet: a 28-date US club tour that includes opening for Sarah Borges and the Broken Singles tomorrow at Johnny D's. Several CD-release parties are also scheduled for September, when the new album comes out.

To capture what it was after with "Oh My God, Charlie Darwin," the band holed up in a remote cabin on Block Island and recorded in the dead of winter. Portable equipment was transported by ferry to the hideaway. On the one hand, Miller says, "the bleak landscape and the absence of other human sounds left us to deal with ourselves." On the other, "it was very tense because we were trying to get everything done in 10 days."

Although Miller and Prystowsky started the band several years back at Brown University, where they had both studied composition (they also played together in an amateur baseball league in Connecticut), they met fellow Brown student Adams when they enlisted her to record a clarinet track on the new album. Adams had grown up studying classical music and says she "had gone to many, many [Low Anthem] shows" before she joined the band in November 2007.

Ask her who her biggest musical influences have been and Adams cites Bob Dylan, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, and that venerable rock 'n' roller Gustav Mahler. Of her bandmates, Adams says, "I love their dedication and the obvious love of music, and I'm blown away by their ideas."

It wasn't always that way for Prystowsky, who, after years of practicing and playing, felt as though music had run its course in his life. The spark, he says, just flickered out.

"I wanted to be a professional baseball player or a baseball historian," Prystowsky, a second baseman, says with a smile. "At a certain point, I became disenchanted with music. It didn't feel as exciting. But since joining the band, I feel like I've got that fire again. I feel like we're onto something and it's satisfying."

"We're still working on it every day," Miller says of both the Low Anthem and the intraband relationships that drive it. "We're very different from one another. Musically, we're very similar, but I think there's a lot of tension when the three of us are playing together or hanging out. In some ways, it's good because when you're butting heads with someone who wants to do things a different way, you're challenging yourself to sharpen your ideas. I think our identity has grown out of that tension."