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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 |
Hellcat Records Give 'Em The Boot II asskickin punkandreggae 3 bucks Plan 9 |
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.
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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