33 rebellions per minute
"Picturing them just reminds me of calendar scenes"
1996
Rasputina, THANKS FOR THE ETHER
Three women with cellos, and occasionally a drummer, make an album that I suppose qualifies as Pop/Rock in the same way
that Megadeth, They Might Be Giants, and Bjork do. 14 songs, 5 ambient noodlings to spoken word bits (in the sense that
8th grade history-class reports, read aloud, are "spoken word") about stuff like cannibalism and Kate Moss--- that's 2
_different_ spoken word bits; I don't think cannnibals would like Kate Moss. The songs themselves have a curious air of
19th-century feminist protest song, from the straightforward sweatshop lament "My Little Shirtwaist Fire" thru the aptly
woozy marijuana tribute "Sister Sleep" (_real_ 19th-century American women did opium, but same principle) to the quiet
slow simmer of "Dig Ophelia": "Your eyes never close, your mind's not at rest/ lay back, get waterlogged, give us a kiss/
water spreads the small seed, water kills the tall weed, Ophelia". A cover of the blues "Why Don't You Do Me Right?"
updates to the 1920's, but I admit a sneaking hope they understand how too-wimpy their cello use is, next to the instrument's potential, and that their future lies in the energetic cello-trio pop-song closer "Trust All
Stars", in which the righteous indignation is vented at a lousy boyfriend who didn't once have the basic honesty to mention
his being an alien scouting the invasion of earth. For now, this is a good record, and what the hell, it's the finest of its kind.
1998
Rasputina, HOW WE QUIT THE FOREST
Rasputina's follow-up, which there was never any doubt of me wanting to buy, came with a sad and unexpected price: I no longer enjoy their debut, except (a big except) for "Trust All Stars". THANKS FOR THE ETHER is still the best album of its kind, but I no longer am able to reconcile any definition of "kind" that includes such now-obvious timidity and half-heartedness. FOREST has one easily explainable change, and one that is simply evident and acceptable as given. The former: instead of being a cello trio, Rasputina are now three cellists and one veteran (Chris Vrenna) of Nine Inch Nails, as programmer, drummer, and producer. The latter: Melora Creager is suddenly, quite clearly, one of the world's great singers, easily capable of molding any song to her mood, and the wispiness of her first-album performances is probably a result of nothing more than awful coaching.
"Thee Olde Headboard" is the album's opener and manifesto. It's hard to believe, though apparently true, that no guitars or basses were involved in the creation of this track; cellos are processed into sharp, wah-wah attacks that act as heavy, clipped drumless beats and pointillist melodies at the same time. Bowed cellos that sound like cellos play jittery rhythms, giving some classy chamber-pop air, and Melora's delivery is at its most richly, educated-accent contralto at the same time she adopts a hip-hop cadence. Melora sings, despite the olde-fashionede title, about "I give thanks for all the things I stole", about "your dumb idea for secretive platonic dating", about "Yo no comprendo" (which, in the steady near-basso monotone she uses for the line, sounds far more macho barrio-Mexican than aristocrat Spanish to these ears), and, as the first rhyme of the album, about "Space Ghost Coast-To-Coast", a late-'90's cartoon reference with, that I can see, no purpose other than to vividly illustrate contradictions in a way that reviewers can point out (thanks, Mel!). Loud applause leads into the arena rock "Leech-Wife", its vocals loud and swooping, its cellos a riff-happy shade of Deep Purple.
Only then do we get to the delicate, slightly tango-fied cover of "You Don't Own Me", with quietly determined singing and castanets keeping the rhythm. "The New Zero", my favorite song here, quietly layers two distinct vocal melodies over each other. The truly string-sectioned attractiveness of "Rose K" and "Sign Of The Zodiac" surround the wonderingly intoned "Dwarf Star", which uses blasted fuzz-cello to simulate an all-electronic rhythm track like a Nine Inch Nails song stripped down to a random choice of half-a-dozen layers. "May Fly", reminiscent of Lisa Germano's "Sycophant", lays circling plucked-string patterns and calmly wavering vocals against a pulsing and deliberately jarring drum machine program, sounding halfway between the intro of NIN's "Closer" and the outro of Smashing Pumpkins' "Eye" but shifting the emphasis and length of virutally every measure-- it would be hard for me to choose a better one-song illustration of why I think alternative time signatures are an important musical tool. "Christian Soldiers" follows with an approximate string arrangement of "Onward Christian Soldiers" over which Melinda, in a lisping, hesitant schoolgirl-reciting voice, informs us that "The medieval exorcists used a 20-gallon brass syringe filled with holy water, which they piped into the anus of the possessed" [full lyric]. "Things I'm Gonna Do" sounds instrumentally like Nirvana doing a march on MTV Unplugged, while Melora combining Kristin Hersh's quiet self-aimed venom with good pitch, but "Diamond Mind" has her speaking in a naggy Noo Yawk accent over a pseudo-elegant musical parody of those Four Months Of Your Salary Lasting A Lifetime ads. "Watch T.V.", my other favorite, sends Chris over to the piano, while also handling a drum part something like a wild flail at a pile of dry leaves, and the strings generate a slow but powerful momentum; but Melora dominates with fragile heartbroken (her favorite show was cancelled) high notes that make me wince in sympathy for her inability to hit them even as I realize "no, wait, she _did_ hit them, perfectly. How?"
Melora's lyrics refine their unique first-album sensibility of a girl who could never quite remember, in school, if she was supposed to be hiding her comic books under her history text, or vice versa. "Leech-Wife", "...Zodiac", "...Soldiers", and the Nazi experiment tale "Herb Girls Of Birkenau" all focus with tomboy fascination on real-life tales of gruesome medicine. "MayFly" ("It lives one day") and "Things..." ("Off to be examined b a scientific team") extend the picture: you can tell that, whether she liked the movie Stand By Me or not, she'd have total sympathy with its characters' goals of getting to go see a dead body, though she managed to parlay her fascination into better report cards than they did. "Rose K", however, shows serious empathy for its subject (Rose Kennedy) amidst carefully noted details both third-person ("Of _course_ her family fought over the furniture") and slipping into first-person ("O why won't he shut up? I take my medicine and crush my paper cup"). "The New Zero" is sung in sympathy to a robotic apocalpypse-bearing ice monster that everyone picks on. "Dwarf Star" is simply bizarre, an exercise to see how many times Melora can flatly contradict herself without really saying anything in the first place, but "How We Quit The Forest" is an ambitious fable with an Ostrich, an Egret, and a Peacock. It's not a fable I really understand beyond the wise mantra "The scene wasn't what it used to be. The scene is _never_ what it used to be"; but isn't that enough?
Rasputina are anyhting but a scene gone before; even a summary of their ingredients ("yeah yeah, quasi-industrial girl-group chamber-pop") doesn't catch the sheer self-consistent insularity of the world they've constructed from a lifetime of informational detritus. And admit it, you never would've thought to blend those ingredients in the first place.
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