Rasputina

Sister Kinderhook

(Filthy Bonnet)

Record Review by Adam McKibbin

Melora Creager would have been forgiven for jumping the shark by now.  Her band, Rasputina, has gone through numerous lineup changes and label changes as Creager has explored her decidedly unique musical and lyrical vision (Rasputina’s genre is somewhere in the barely populated region of “cello-driven gothic-folk”).  One of the weirdest things about the band’s past is that they started out on Columbia; if that’s not a sign of how much the record business has changed, I don’t know what is.  Granted, Creager played cello with Nirvana, but it’s still hard to listen to her singing jubilantly amidst a dramatic string arrangement about fossil discovery that proves the existence of warring giants (“Holocaust of Giants”) and imagining a Columbia A&R type thinking “Cha-ching!”

The good thing about essentially inventing your own genre and being influenced more by your imagination and the library than the local music clubs – well, there are several good things, but one of them is that you may get an extended shelf life.  Rasputina was never particularly of the moment, so nearly 20 years after their formation and 15 years after their full-length debut, they sound as out-of-time as ever, but not “dated.”  Creager herself describes them, fairly aptly, as “like top-40 hits from another dimension.”

The beginning of Sister Kinderhook particularly supports that description.  “Sweet Sister Temperance” and “Holocaust of Giants” are two of the catchiest tracks on the album, each with indelible vocal melodies.  For further lyrical curiosities, check out “Snow-Hen of Austerlitz,” in which a little girl is mistakenly kept as a pet by her blind mother (“I heard she’s pretty, but she don’t have all her wits”).  Though she’s playing with new bandmates – second cellist Brian DeJesus and Catie D’Amica – Creager has returned to a fairly familiar place here, a “classic Rasputina” place.  That’s a place that remains as vibrant and enchanting to visit as ever.