Eerie Wanda
Pet Town
Joyful Noise Recordings
The first thing I was struck by with Eerie Wanda was the album’s cover art. It is a simple monochrome photo of a woman, seated on a divan, with a crude drawing of a bird on her shoulder. There is nothing particularly memorable about it except the photo looks like my wife’s best friend since childhood. “Uncanny” was the phrase my wife used to describe the photo. Uncanny is also an apt adjective for Pet Town. An unassuming record that slips into your coat pocket like a memory waiting to be found on a long, cold afternoon day when the shadows begin to flatten.
A Croatian refugee from war torn Yugoslavia, relocated in the Netherlands seems a natural to deconstruct American roots music, right? Eerie Wanda, a music project of Marina Tadic has the uncanny ability to sound at once warm and familiar yet exotic and slightly unsafe. Her songs echo from a haunted jukebox playing Patsy Cline and the wrong speed seeping through the walls at night. The songs combine country, rockabilly, and even calypso elements with a playful childlike glee. Songs like “Big Blue Bird” or “Hands of the Devil” with their hand claps and clip clops recall the best of old-timey records from the like of Roy Rogers and Gene Autry while reflecting on the very real and sometime surreal adult life built on the ashes of things we were supposed to leave behind.
Pet Town is available digitally, CD, and on black or tricolor vinyl.
