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Rapt and Unwrapped
1-1-00
(printed as "Maybe it's the beer" in C-Ville Weekly Vol.12, No.2)

Ululating Mummies - Gift Horse - Robert Jospe
Lauren Hoffman's From the Blue House
Danny Schmidt's Live at the Prism Coffeehouse
Bella Morte's Where Shadows Lie

Used CD of the week:
Hellcat Records
Give 'Em The Boot II
asskickin
punkandreggae
3 bucks
Plan 9
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Dig that Santa fez
Tuesday, 12-21-99 -
The Ululating Mummies hit Rapture to lay out some of their third world folk quirkiness. A fantastic band with a lot of energy and an alien encounter vibe, the Richmond based combo poured on mounds of their matured future folk - a sort of retro middle-eastern jazz thing with a tint of humor to the whole proceedings. The rapture crowd was enthusiastic and dancers twirled like dervishes. Drunk ones.

I really didn't want to go, but I felt compelled to crawl and so found myself at the Outback Lodge at the end of a mellow night for Gift Horse. Fans of Pavement will either love or hate these guys, because they're doing a decent approximation of the Pavement groove - garage-loud guitars from outer space and Sunday-morning-after-the-party lyrics whined through lovely sonic rock. They're pretty good but I'll have to check 'em out some other time to give you the whole story. The last couple tunes of a slow night usually isn't the best time to catch a band that's going for energy.

Jos and Co.
Wednesday, 12-29-99 - Rapture caught me in its fiery grip once again when
Robert Jospé and a variation of his jazz combo (sans keyboard) came in for a show. Despite being one member short, they performed eloquent mutated jazz for a stuffed house. The crowd at Rapture was interested, but they really lit up when the band kicked into a big blues ho-down that featured a seven minute rip by Royce Campbell, a Harrisonburg transplant and jazz guitarist of some note. When at last it ended with a gushing finale, they turned back to hard jazz and the crowd immediately returned to talking and carrying on. Maybe it's the beer. Wednesday nights at Rapture will now be a regular gig for drum genius Jospé (or "Jos," as he's known), so you can be sure to catch a good show down there soon.

Holidays always freak me out so I spent alot of time cleaning my hutch, playing the flugelhorn, watching cable and listening to local CDs. Here's an abbreviated review of a couple of the discs that came across my desk in the last year of the 1900's.

Lauren Hoffman - From the Blue House - One of the bonuses of getting out of her recording contract with Virgin Records, besides getting to keep the rights to her first disc, Megiddo, was the installation of an analog home studio in Lauren Hoffman's blue house in Free Union. There she laid down the tracks for her appropriately named second album From the Blue House. While not as lavish as her first record, Blue House shows off the maturation of Hoffman's alternative rock songwriting and the sophistication of her newfound down-home aesthetic. Acoustic instruments are lovingly recorded and transparent. The songs are cunning and unpretentiously personal, many appearing to be about people she's known. There's a dead lover (Song for a Boy), a sister (Sister), a friend who desires success (Dust Off Your Dreams), a dream lover (Whoever You Are, composed by jazz mentors John D'earth and Dawn Thompson), a brilliant performer who doesn't look so good (Look Like Shit) and a foiled pick-up artist (Magic Stick). The record comes off like a mellow house party thrown by a bitingly clever hostess. Lovers of Megiddo may be slow to warm to the low-key production of Blue House - there's a good bit less flash - but the songs are better and the record itself speaks to the vibe of the pot-holed road to success that winds through our shady region.

Danny Schmidt - Live at the Prism Coffeehouse - Schmidt cranked out Live during a one night stand at Charlottesville's only dedicated acoustic venue, the Prism, back in April '99. The result is a loving tribute to the brilliance of a performer in the classic singer/songwriter tradition. I'm not normally so attracted to the balladeer tradition - long verses sung over repetitive musical phrases with pretty little simple choruses that come around every minute or so, but Schmidt's folky visions of honest love and small town utopia sucked me in. Live is an exceptional performance recording that serves as a documentary of the opening pages of a noteworthy talent. Goofy between-song banter was left in, providing an amateur charm, but the musical quality of the recording and Schmidt's subtle songwriting and spot-on performances (check out the guitar work on McCreary's Pipes) assure that this album should be well received in any folk arena.

Bella Morte - Where Shadows Lie - Out of the blackest underbelly of Charlottesville's Tokyo Rose nightclub crawled Bella Morte, dark dance overlords for a ghoulie generation, conjuring gothic keyboard rock and synthesizer dreams. Where Shadows Lie is a bold second effort from the band that sets haunting melodies and electronic dance grooves against an industrial backdrop. Smaller budget gothic recordings often suffer from low-fidelity syndrome: drum-machines sound cheesy and thin, vocals are muddy, and the overall sound is flat or compressed - but Shadows is a big, well-defined record with memorable songs that veer between severity, beauty and humor. Engineered by Siddal's Richard Brinkley, Where Shadows Lie is putting Charlottesville on Count Chocula's tour of cool American dungeon scenes.

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