From: owner-goths-digest@smoe.org (goths-digest) To: goths-digest@smoe.org Subject: goths-digest V2 #138 Reply-To: goths@smoe.org Sender: owner-goths-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-goths-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk goths-digest Friday, September 25 1998 Volume 02 : Number 138 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Article - HWQTF [Anitra33@aol.com] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 24 Sep 1998 20:55:20 EDT From: Anitra33@aol.com Subject: Article - HWQTF (hmm, i hope i sent this correctly; i'm still inexperienced at this.) I got a copy of this week's Riverfront Times (a free newspaper in St. Louis), and there was a little article about the Ladies under a section called "Faerie Queens" which also featured the Mediæval Bæbes. I wouldn't type it up if it were in a magazine, but since it's only available in STL as far as I know, I'll just type up the Rasputina part since I know that'll be of at least some interest. I'm not sure if it's wholly positive or negative criticism. - -- Faerie Queens by Jill Smith ..Whereas the Mediæval Bæbes pose as tarts to proffer innocuous ditties about pain, Rasputina are music geeks offering painful songs about, well, I don't know exactly. Haunting the far end of the creative anachronist spectrum, this Brooklyn-based trio of cellists is that most deadly of combinations: classically trained musicians with bohemian aspirations. Their album How We Quit the Forest (Columbia) presents suffering in the shape of a techno- pastoral schizophrenia that is just plain hard to listen to. Although nowhere is it written that pop music need be flimsy or formulaic, these girls are definitely pushing the envelope. Thanks to former Nine Inch Nailer Chris Vrenna's drum loops -- and some wacky effects on those cellos -- songs such as "The Olde Headboard," "Leechwife," and "Dwarfstar" almost rock, in an awkward, deviant sense of the word. However, if you seek a holy grail on this disc, you will find it in the absolutely twisted cover of Leslie Gore's early-'60's hit "You Don't Own Me." This cut is so unapologetically dissonant and misshapen that I briefly wondered whether they'd nipped so much mead in the studio that they didn't notice they were playing the wrong notes. Even on the softer balladesque tracks, Forest is difficult and edgy chamber music that teeters on the precipice of a nervous breakdown. If it succeeds as an oeuvre, it's only because you don't know which way it's going to fall. Fantasy enthusiasts will appreciate Rasputina's songwriter/vocalist, Melora Creager, whose gossamer tremolo would be the envy of any ringlet-tressed Faerie Queene of Avalon. As the cellos claw their way through underbrush tangled in thorny minor keys and distortion boxes, Creager tiptoes delicately through an Arcadian glade of lyric whimsy. She hints at intimate relationships with furry, clawed beasts, waxes existential over the plight of the mayfly ("it lives/one day"), and laments the mysterious disappearance of a band of apron-clad maidens known as the "herb girls of Birkenau." Meanwhile, jarring allusions to "experiment victims," materialism and the senile Rose Kennedy rupture her vaguely Narnian discourse. Creager also ponies up the hipster-cred points: She played with Nirvana during their last European tour. Forest's juxtaposition of trendy postmodern production with the quirky sylvan idiom is occasionally interesting, but more often than not this studied weirdness merely clubs home the tiresome point that Rasputina is cooler than you are. Insufferable. - -- Sorry if this was irritatingly long to read, but I thought *someone* might be interested. - --Samantha ------------------------------ End of goths-digest V2 #138 ***************************