![[Sharps and Flats]](sharps.gif)
RECENT REVIEWS:
4/15/97:
4/14/97:
4/11/97:
4/10/97:
4/09/97:
4/08/97:
SEARCH MUSIC ARCHIVES BY:
|
 MIRADOR | r e p r i s e paula Frazer starts her band Tarnation's third album, "Mirador," with her neatest trick yet: a levitational soprano hoot, sort of an enunciated cousin to a yodel, bursting with lonesome cowgirl emotion. She repeats this trick dozens of times over the course of the disc, and every single time, it sounds like heaven itself is crying. The song, "An Awful Shade of Blue," continues with the same Country Western 101 guitar part tweaked on the theme from "Blazing Saddles." Still, it's delivered without the slightest hint of a smirk, and suddenly the riff is as devastating as it must have been in 1952. But the whole thing is so melodramatic, you find yourself asking, Is this for real, or are Tarnation just putting it on? Of course it's an affectation. Frazer is an old California punk -- she was in Frightwig back in the '80s and started Tarnation in the early '90s with other punk scene veterans. But she also has a deep, unapologetic love for a uniquely artificial moment in the history of country music: the moment when the song styles of the Old West were cleaned up for mass consumption, bathed in an echo of the Grand Canyon and served up with quasi-classical vibrato and perfect enunciation. Frazer's got an unbelievably great voice, whether high and sweet or low and mournful, that ekes every last bit of drama out of the words. There's a hint of Patsy Cline in her slow-tempo laments, but Roy Orbison, who also had a tendency to aim for the money notes, is actually her closest kin. The tragic scope, chasmic reverb and flamenco flourishes of Orbison's records are all over "Mirador." But sometimes Tarnation stretches out too far. The woozy, dissonant, endless "Christine" was the weakest song on their 1993 debut, "I'll Give You Something To Cry About!" and it's the worst song here as well. The band does better by the garage-rock chestnut "Little Black Egg," which they gently play straight while Frazer gives its melody a wistful twang. Frazer's best songs are the ones on which she embraces the clichés
she's mastered. "Is She Lonesome Now?" re-recorded from Frazer's solo
single, has her operatic keen all over it: When she rhymes "is she all alone" with "I wonder where that good gal's gone," she mimics a ridiculous Western accent just to make it sound right; and when she mentions a "northbound train," she is accompanied by clippity-clop horse sound effects. It couldn't possibly be cornier. And it couldn't be more beautiful.
-- Douglas Wolk Douglas Wolk is a writer, editor and musician living in New York. |
