Music Reviews

Melora Creager
Melora a la Basilica
12/30/08
Filthy Bonnet Recording Co.
www.rasputina.com

RATING: BAD ASS

Inside a glue factory, a girl donning a corset and Victorian bloomers is holding a cello. This may sound like production notes for a David Lynch film, but it was actually the scenery which inspired the latest release from Melora Creager, whose music isn’t so far off from the transgressive postmodernism of Lynch’s cinema. Melora a la Basilica is a live album, recorded by Creager and fellow cellist Daniel DeJesus in a defunct glue factory, which combines songs from Creager’s primary band, Rasputina, with the playfully subversive covers that she has such a propensity for.

Accompanied by Rasputina, Creager’s music tends to be satirically quirky, yet without the pop sensibility that drums often add, her gently somber tales become apocalyptically haunting. While Rasputina’s pop aesthetics undermined the coldness of the traditionally Eurocentric musicality associated with cellos, this release forces the listener to confront not only that coldness, but the coldness of modern life in general, albeit in a very masochistically enjoyable manner. Rasputina’s “Wicked Dickie” and “Rose K.” are no longer sing-along-able, but chilling portraits of humanity.

Although Melora has rarely miscalculated a cover, her take on “American Girl” sounds dangerously close to the String Tribute to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers which can be found in budget bins across America. The rest of the covers, however, fail to fall victim to any clichés, including an arrangement of Goldfrapp’s “Clowns” superior to the original. The album’s highlight is an unrecognizable (and almost unlistenable) a cappella interpretation of Pearl Jam’s ode to Bill Gates, “Soon Forget,” whose horrifying echoes sound along the lines of a musical coda to Pasolini’s Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom. This can’t help but make you wonder whether Mr. Gates and the Marquis de Sade were ever really that distant. Izzy Cihak