Mark Rogers & Mary Byrne: ‘I Line My Days Along Your Weight’

• Shervin Lainez
• Mary Byrne (from left) and Mark Rogers

Atlanta expats Mark Rogers and Mary Byrne return from New York tonight (Mon., Nov. 3), playing songs from their first album together, I Line My Days Along Your Weight (Important Records). The tangle of their respective acoustic strumming and melodies, and Byrne’s austere self-reflection and easy-on-the-ears singing voice, are at once earthy and haunting. Strong hints of Americana and the Avant-garde show up in songs such as, “First Fall Nights,” “Hospital,” “A Racing Heart,” and “Sirens Call,” plumbing the depths of shadowy musical and psychological recesses that are more complex than that of the average acoustic duo’s song fare. This is only natural: Rogers’ time playing music in Atlanta included a stint holding down the twisted Spaghetti Western dirges of Myssouri for the album War/Love Blues. Likewise, Byrne honed her rich, often perplexing, but always intriguing lyrical style with long gone local acts Shamgod and Hot Young Priest. For more on her lyrics, just let the album’s title sink in for a few minutes — I Line My Days Along Your Weight. The mental images these words conjure know no bounds, while never offering anything definitive.

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Compelling to the end, the album’s noirish and autumnal tones quietly shift from sparse to a full-bodied plunge into spiritual unease and world-weariness. As such, these 10 songs take shape as a panoramic view of an intensely inner-directed body of work that makes for the perfect soundtrack for a cold November night.

Mark Rogers & Mary Byrne play the Earl tonight (Mon., Nov. 3), with Love Me Till My Heart Stops and Moses Nesh. $5. 8:30 p.m. 488 Flat Shoals Ave. 404-522-3950. www.badearl.com.