Monday, January 19, 2009
Monday Music #3: Rose Berlin, Unwoman
Three weeks in and I am already starting to doubt the sustainability of this enterprise. My pet theory, which has about twenty logical holes waiting for the poking, is that January in music is like January in movies. Wrong in so many ways, but it makes a good rationalization.
It so happens, though, that I also have a habit of staying up until obscene hours. The timestamp on that last entry is wrong. It says 12:27 AM, but it's really, er, five hours later. This is unfortunate for my body chemistry but fortunate for discovering things to write about the day after.
It wasn't that I procrastinated on purpose. I spent quite a bit of time seeking out new music to write about. The problem was that I didn't love most of it enough to write about, or I loved something that wasn't new to me. This is a resolution, after all, and I'd like to at least pay lip service to staying in its parameters.
Turns out I was approaching it the wrong way. Going out purposefully trying to find music has never really worked for me. Most of it comes to me, whether it's from mailing list posts or Google News items or, in a few cases, totally unexpected discoveries when I'm poking around looking other things up. And so it is with these artists.
Now let's have at it!
Rose Berlin, "You and I Forever" - I wound up on her MySpace page at about 4:30 AM (as I said...) while doing some Coraline research. Some people I know really dislike tribute albums, but I never understood that. Already you have a built-in entry point - artists who like what you like! And as far as unexpected connnections go, she apparently shares a PR representative with Thea Gilmore.
Forget these details and you might be a bit skeptical about her page. The truth is, though, it just looks like something a 16-year-old made, which it is. Fight this skepticism. The music is great. I had trouble deciding which song to write about (the guitars alone on "Take It Off" make it a contender for me), but decided on "You and I Forever," which is a wonderful breezy bit of power-pop which I've been listening to, on and off, the entire day and have yet to become sick of. Color me very, very impressed.
No CD that I could find, but the song's available in its entirety here:
Listen here.
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Unwoman - Caught Her: This week I also sent out a desperate plea to Ecto asking for CD Baby recommendations. Boy, did I get recommendations. Dozens of them. My wallet is cringing in the corner and my wish list is even more bloated than before.
Now then. Pretty much everything Unwoman (real name: Erica Mulkey) has done has been on my CD Baby wish list for some time. Or so I thought. It turns out that I never really delved into it much, because she has a lot more albums than I remembered. One from last year, even! But that's not the one this is about.
Her recording name, of course, is from Margaret Atwood. That's not the only unexpected (well, in this case, it's a bit telegraphed) connection, though. "Caught Her" is from her 2007 album Blossoms, which adds to the equation cellos (Mulkey is a cellist) and Edna St. Vincent Millay (the second half of the album is settings of her poems.) Again, it was difficult to choose, but I settled on "Three Songs Of Shattering," from said second half. It's everything a poem setting should be. A lot of settings can be bland, but Mulkey's interpretation of the words is spot on and the solo cello instrumentation is dynamic enough to fill in the gaps.
The full song's available on her site and a clip is here: Listen here.
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