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Cocooned Sarah Fimm 2001
My Sweet Grotesque Where Echoes End 2001
Drink The Sky outloud dreamer 2000
Olio Randomvariate 2001
Reviewed by Sienna Powers
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The music industry loves categories. When I first started writing about music, I hated that about it. It wasn't enough to file a piece, you had to let editors know where in the music store you thought a band belonged. I understand this love of categorization better now. If you're a Goo Goo Dolls fan, you don't want to have to search through a lot of recordings by Barry Manilow and Celine Dion to get there. In fact, even encountering Celine Dion on a Goo Goo Dolls search is pretty irritating. And so, we categorize. But even with slots all neatly built, there is some music that just won't fit. Round pegs, square holes and all of that. Although it isn't always the case, this can be especially true early in a musical act's career. And sometimes it isn't just that the music doesn't fit the holes, but that the hole has not yet adapted to fit the music. Here's an example: because of the type of airplay she gets and the sort of people who buy her albums, Alanis Morissette would currently most accurately be described as Pop/Adult Alternative. Yet, had Jagged Little Pill crossed my desk early in 1995, I wouldn't have quite known what to do with it. Though, if I'd been writing for Blue Coupe, I would have known it went to "Avant," which is Blue Coupe-ish for "currently uncategorizable but we still have to stick it somewhere." That is, like everyone else, we have to nail it down at least a little bit: it can't just be floating about unanchored. As I said, the Avant category is often most appropriate early in an act's career. Because of this, Blue Coupe gets a lot of music from emerging artists that can't really be easily placed into any of the other slots. Here are a few Avantish releases that I've gotten lately. From first glance at her face, her name, her liner notes and even at first listen to her music, it would be easy to think that Sarah Fimm was nothing more than the latest entry into the Sarah McLachlan soundalike wars. But listen more closely: Sarah Fimm is quite clearly doing her own thing. On Fimm's debut album, Cocooned, the chanteuse reminds one, if anything, of a slightly mad, slightly evil McLachlan. There is a considered, gothic quality to Fimm's music, as seen on "Sexual Animals," currently getting lots of college airplay: Come inside of me Or, from "Circus Type Thing": The flowers die Almost all of Cocooned was written by Fimm, whose strong piano and thoughtful lyrics put the listener in mind of Tori Amos perhaps more than any other performer. But Cocooned shows Fimm as an -- as yet unsigned and undiscovered -- original. While it's a little bit tempting to classify Where Echoes End's latest album, My Sweet Grotesque, as Electronica, the outfit's prog metal roots and the deliciously-Marge stylings of vocalist MichelAngela prompts its inclusion in this Avant roundup because -- clearly -- this is a tough album to categorize. Where Echoes End was formed by Eddie Katz and Paul Read pretty much on the ashes of Vauxdvihl, the Australian prog metal band the two had been involved with for over a decade. Their debut CD, 1998's By The Pricking Of My Thumb was, in their own words, "a nightmarish vision of how greed creates prisoners of us." While the album gained critical acclaim, it continued to be overlooked by distributors. The duo had begun writing the material for their next album, My Sweet Grotesque, when Read was diagnosed with leukemia. He died later in 1998. Prior to Read's death, he and Katz had brought drummer Dean Vine into the mix. But it was the recruitment of MichelAngela and her driving vocals that would most alter the sound of Where Echoes End. If My Sweet Grotesque sometimes sounds as though more work has gone into it than is, strictly speaking, warranted, it may be this difficult path that has contributed. But the basics are here, they just need sharpening up. The synths are sometimes a little over-the-top and MichelAngela's vocals are often forced, as well. Sometimes, however, it all gels. "What's Left To Kill," is sublime. MichelAngela's voice soars, the music and the mix all fly together and it just... all... comes together. Beautiful. And, ironically, in a group that has mostly left pure instrumentals behind, an instrumental, "No One I Know" is perfectly crystalline and one of the most memorable tracks on the CD. outloud dreamer's Drink the Sky is one of those albums that make you glad you keep an ear on indie. outloud dreamer is Carl Adami -- bass, bass ensemble, ambiance, organ, synthesizer, drum programming, sequencing, electric guitar and producer -- and Sarah Medenbach -- vocals and piano. And in addition to doing almost everything, Adami wrote all of the music on the nine track set and Medenbach wrote all of the lyrics. And it works. Oh my God, it works! Drink The Sky has all the right stuff: strong instrumentals (even if most of them are Adami), gorgeous descriptive vocals and, it seems, a real reason for being. This is not one to overlook. A new album is slated to be released later in 2002. When I first saw the title of Randomvariate's four album box set, I thought of the British Kleenex of margarines, now defunct. But that was Oleo. The title of Randomvariate's debut is Olio, which the Microsoft Encarta College Dictionary tells me is either "a highly spiced stew" or "a miscellaneous collection of things." Really, for my purposes, either thing works. Margarine is thick and spreadable and stews are made by taking many disparate things and cooking them into something pretty evenly flavored. Randomvariate is Matt Kenagy and Steve Henigan, though over 40 musicians and artists contributed to the project. They'd had to have: there are 58 songs on Olio, though all were written by 26-year-old Henigan. And therein lies Olio's greatest problem. I don't care who you are, by age 26 you haven't written 58 songs worthy of sharing with the world. Hell: even really great songwriters hope for a dozen by then. And is Henigan a really great songwriter? Who knows: the simple expanse of Olio makes it tough to tell. There's a lot that's marginal here and the stuff that's fairly great sounds enough like the marginal material that it's... well... it's hard to separate the beef from the pearl onions. Henigan and Kenagy need to learn about editing. Their energy -- and their money, because, of course, Olio is self produced and distributed -- would have been better spent on culling the herd and putting all of the energy from producing the 58 into just a well-chosen 14. As it is, Olio is too much: too much angst, too much repetition of themes and progressions and, in the end, too much Randomvariate. Hopefully future productions by the duo will be more selective. | April 2002
Sienna Powers is a writer, editor and visual artist. |
But even with slots all neatly built, there is some music that just won't fit. Round pegs, square holes and all of that. Although it isn't always the case, this can be especially true early in a musical act's career. And sometimes it isn't just that the music doesn't fit the holes, but the hole has not yet adapted to fit the music. |
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