Rasputina
Sister Kinderhook
If your lead is playing cello, somehow it’s not a real rock and roll band. Still, the mysterious and environmental effects of a cello cannot be ignored; this entire collection somehow sounds like the music is played backwards while the lyrics run forward and have no hint of satanic subtext. Rasputina is a loose collective run out of a farm house in Hudson, NY with Melora Creager as its directress. The cello meister is Daniel DeJesus, while rhythms flow from Catie D’Amica on concert bass, djembe, and ankle bells and Creager covers the harpsichord and banjo and sings in a folksy contralto. With that eccentric collection of instrumentation and skills, the lyrics are suitably eccentric. Long ballads featuring complex lyrics describing potentially historic events and elaborate fantasies fill the disc. “Holocaust of Giants” explores the relics of a giant’s bones, and the society that might have left only a single set of remains to mark its passing. In “Snow Hen of Austerlitz” a feral child wanders the icy battlefields left in ruins by the Napoleonic wars, and “Utopian Society” makes passing reference to an 18th century drag queen. If you don’t pay close attention to the lyrics, Rasputina sounds like experimental chamber music, but when you attend to the words, it a different story – REALLY different. But in a good way.
Rasputina: http://www.rasputina.com
