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Album Reviews
Myshkin's Ruby Warblers
rosebuds-bullets
Myshkin's website splash page has a drawing of a girl, staring intently at a dead bird, upturned in the palm of her hand. It is a fitting image for her album, rosebud-bullets. Full of personal revelations and smoky ghosts, it flows like a gypsy robe, twirling and twisting around the shape of a snake's hiss. It's jaunty and danceable and full of the kind of raw emotion neccesary for predending you are a rock star in front of your bedroom mirror.
Technically, this is not a Portland CD. It was made in New Orleans with the help of some brilliant musicians but Myshkin moved here some time last year, much to our good furtune. If her live shows are anything as poweful as her recorded ones then I would go and see her before she outgrows our modest little town. -AR
Pennsyltucky Takeover
Junkyard Sunrise
The Pennsyltucky Takeover have been a mildly frustrating band for me for two reasons. One: I lost the CD cover so I don't have any information about them, which brings me to point two: There is no information about them.
No names, no gigs, no website. Which isn't all that surprising for an old-timey style band. They are not a particularly traditional old-timey band though. On track one there is liberal use of an evelope filtered whatsounds like an electric archtop and electric guitars don't quite cut in the traditional bluegrass world. And the piano/banjo combo lends a ragtime feel to the songs. It's as though the Hot Licks got together with Dan Hick's drinking buddies and made the album we wish he would have made after Last Train to Hicksville.
The musicians are exceptional and the song writing is clever in all the best ways. And one of the vocalists, of which I gather are three, sounds like Popeye. Hell, as far as I know the entire beautiful ordeal was made by one person on his four-track in the basement of his mother's house. Whatever. It's a great album, each song is as fun as the next. And the CD itself is black on the read side, not that irradescant mirrored reflection color. Black. It's fucking cool. I give this album 14 and a half roasted chickens. -AR
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