From: owner-bklist-digest@smoe.org (bklist-digest) To: bklist-digest@smoe.org Subject: bklist-digest V2 #48 Reply-To: bklist@smoe.org Sender: owner-bklist-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-bklist-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk X-To-Unsubscribe: Send mail to "bklist-digest-request@smoe.org" X-To-Unsubscribe: with "unsubscribe" as the body. bklist-digest Saturday, December 26 1998 Volume 02 : Number 048 Today's Subjects: ----------------- REVIEW: Outside the Beauty Salon [Gordon Wong ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 25 Dec 1998 06:35:25 -0800 From: Gordon Wong Subject: REVIEW: Outside the Beauty Salon Merry Christmas, everybody!!! This is a review of "Outside the Beauty Salon" that someone just got around to reviewing on December 10, 1998 ... REVIEW: Outside the Beauty Salon (reviewed by "War Against Silence") Some nights, though, when I prefer my depressing vignettes laced with more nihilism than fatalism, and don't insist that they harbor the explicit potential for redemption, the mood suits itself better to a more bracing and directly cathartic approach than Cowboy Junkies' emotional ambiguities. On Brenda Kahn's David Kahne-produced major-label debut, 1992's Epiphany in Brooklyn, her bitter, destructive lyrics and angular, gnashing voice were set to jangly folk-rock, sort of like a cross between Mary Lou Lord, Billy Bragg, Black Sheets of Rain-era Bob Mould and Sylvia Plath, a combination that I found intriguingly unnerving, but not in a way I had much desire to re-experience. By the time 1996's Destination Anywhere came out, though, which as far as I can tell was her next album, she'd switched labels to the more folk-friendly Shanachie, but discarded the folk aspects of her style almost completely, which left her sounding more like a cross between Magnapop, an angrier Belly and the electric side of Sebadoh, a style that was much better suited to the tenor of the experience I wanted from listening to her songs, which was not entirely unlike flogging myself for penance. Outside the Beauty Salon, which came out last year but I'm behind, continues the process of reducing her sound to its base elements, most of these songs built on just drums, bass, Brenda's frayed rhythm guitar, and an occasional lead hook or slide-guitar moan. My favorite parts are very much in keeping with the louder songs on Juliana Hatfield's Bed, perhaps with a little of Bob Mould's rock drone substituted for Juliana's lingering affinity for impish pop, and are probably the closest I've come, in a year of looking, to finding a worthy successor to the Slingbacks' All Pop, No Star, although Brenda tends to replace the summery pop smile that shone through the Slingbacks' power-trio arrangements with a withering snarl. "Matador" is becalmed and scary, creaky guitar noises fluttering around Brenda's clipped narration. With a slightly throatier vocal delivery, the plaintive "Wedding Ring" could be the Geraldine Fibbers. "Lincoln Hotel" is like a country band covering the Sex Pistols, "Hey Romeo" has traces of Penetration and Debbie Harry, and the jagged "The Bridge" reminds me in places of Elastica. "Smoking in the Jane Room" is straight-ahead punk thrash, the anthemic "Alice" could be Sleeper with a little added cello, and "Destination Anywhere", showing up an album too late to be the title track, comes the closest, for me, to the Slingbacks' "No Way Down". The lingering experimental urges are less satisfying for me; the three waltzes, in particular, the jittery "Heather", the chirpy "I Believe in You (Song for Thomas)", and the sultry "Guillotine", all have the gangly earnestness of blues parody, although this may be more a function of the precedents I want this album to adhere to than anything it brings upon itself. If you plan to pay attention to Brenda's lyrics, though, and they're literate enough to warrant the effort, you have to be prepared for a rather relentless gloom. "Matador" is a confused sprawl of abuse-dependency and frightened isolation, although it seems like the narrator is as frightened of herself as she is of anybody else, which makes hiding harder. In "Smoking in the Jane Room" the narrator is so bled dry of hope that a fortune teller refuses to tell her fortune. "Heather" is like Thelma and Louise crossed with Waiting for Godot, so they don't actually go anywhere. The chorus of "Wedding Ring", "I took my wedding ring back / To the diamond store. / I didn't want it. Anymore.", sounds even bleaker than it reads, as if she has so little remaining energy that she's hoping turning the ring back in will spin the planet in reverse so the marriage never happened. "Door Locks" is a three-sentence morning-after conversation without a single human spark. "Alice" is like "Pretty in Pink" after several years on the street. "Guillotine" is like the room where the women come and go, from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", converted into a heroin gallery. "Hey Romeo" is a lover's promise that manages to make both people seem broken and helpless. Addictions, physical and psychological, tear these characters' lives like they're woven out of moth wings, like the idea of using a more durable fabric hasn't occurred to them, and isn't likely to. The photographs in the booklet, of Brenda sitting in an enormous tub, fully clothed, washing her dog, are the album's closest thing to levity. If I look at them while I listen, the songs hurt a little bit less. I haven't decided yet whether that's good or not. ========================================== Thought of the Day: There's no such thing as too much garlic! ------------------------------ End of bklist-digest V2 #48 ***************************