Gospel Gossip - Sing Into My Mouth
ARTIST.....: Gospel Gossip
TITLE......: Sing Into My Mouth
LABEL......: Guilt Ridden Pop
URL........: http://www.gospelgossipband.com
RIP DATE...: Dec-14-2007
STORE DATE.: Dec-13-2007
GENRE......: Indie
QUALITY....: VBR / 44.1Hz / Joint-Stereo
SIZE.......: 55,8 MB
Track Listing:
01 - Home Is Where The Hibah Is 05:01
02 - Revolutions In Physics 04:08
03 - Wire 03:40
04 - (Maybe) 01:07
05 - Shadows Are Bent 03:53
06 - Lucky Lemmings 08:34
07 - (Next) 00:50
08 - Rainbow Magical 02:17
09 - RE-150 03:00
10 - Space Echo 02:00
11 - Wind 03:29
12 - (Fall) 01:21
13 - Mt. Virgil 04:25
─────
43:45 min
Release Notes:
http://www.myspace.com/gospelgossip
http://www.myspace.com/guiltriddenpop
http://www.guiltriddenpop.com
There's an unspoken temptation for an ambitious musician, though
it's perhaps not exclusively a musician's challenge. Like any
discipline, music can lure you to ever-greater heights of
technical prowess. Thus, symphonies follow sonatas, jazz
orchestras follow quintets, and concept albums follow EPs. Yet the
hardest thing to do is often to not do the hardest thing,
following instinct down a path of lesser resistance, leaving
melodies unvarnished and edges jagged.
This is the direction I find my thoughts tending toward while
watching Gospel Gossip - a raw, ragged quartet from Northfield
with 77 shows, a couple hundred miles, and a stunningly compelling
debut album under their belts - perform a set at the Hexagon Bar.
Their sound is kinetic - propelled by Ollie Moltaji's frenetic
drumming and Justin Plank's furiously driven bass - but also awash
in cascading, echoing guitar and fizzing synth textures, courtesy
of singer/guitarist Sarah Nienaber and keyboardist Deanna Steege.
By set's end, Moltaji will have broken multiple sticks, often
without noticing for several bars ("I've been working out," he
jokingly explains later), and Nienaber will have ground her tiny
Fender Mustang into the Hexagon's stage, breaking a string
essential for their set's final song and cutting the whole show
short.
Their disappointment at the show's abrupt ending is palpable.
Plank laments that he had been practicing specifically for their
closer, and Nienaber promises not to let him down in the future.
It'd be easy to ascribe their desire to finish strong to youthful
vigor; after all, Nienaber is still in school at Carleton College,
and the rest of the band members aren't much older. But standing
outside of the Hex in freezing temperatures, it feels more like
simple heart: a need to meet one's own expectations, regardless of
anyone else's.
Gospel Gossip began with a collaboration between Nienaber and
Moltaji, although Moltaji and Plank had already been playing
together in a hardcore band. "It was kind of like Big Black," says
Moltaji, "and then Sarah filmed us once, and I started playing
music with Sarah, and then we talked to Justin - it was all kind
of haphazard, but it turns out that it was a pretty good mix."
"We played for a long time with just the three of us," adds
Nienaber. "Then I got really into Echo and the Bunnymen and
[Ollie] already was, so it was my dream to add a synth player."
Enter Steege - whose keyboard work tips the band's sound into an
equilibrium between raucous and swirling - and the band was ready
to record its Guilt Ridden Pop debut, Sing into My Mouth.
On record, the band makes up in breathing room what they lose in
fury. The songs draw inspiration from the '80s (the Smiths, Echo
and the Bunnymen, Wire) and '90s (Catherine Wheel, Ride, Belly) in
equal measure, while avoiding both the '90s disdain for the '80s
and the '80s disdain for grit. Plank's bass rumbles along with the
kind of thick, nasal tone that takes aggressive picking to
generate, and Moltaji keeps steady and insistent time on the
drums.
Nienaber's vocals are often breathlessly desperate, but the lyrics
are by turns gauzily impressionistic and razor-sharp. "The moon is
out and the streets are wet," she sings on "Shadows Are Bent," "So
tonight you've got me shaking/You're just happy as long as you've
got something/So tonight I don't think I'll be talking." They're
the kind of words that hang between telling a story and painting a
scene, and as the song unspools through slowdowns and ramp-ups, it
lands finally on a note of fragile certainty: "You make me
something, baby."
Sing into My Mouth is an auspicious debut, a record that feels
like a harbinger of bigger, hairier, more sprawling albums to
come, and thus a record that future fans can hold up as the
beginning of something brilliant, should it work out that way.
There's a distance to travel between here and there, though, a
fact that Gospel Gossip are well aware of. Take, for instance, the
double-edged sword of the Minneapolis scene. "It's limiting in
some ways," says Moltaji, "because if you become big in
Minneapolis, how are you gonna get out of it, but when you do get
out of it, there's not a lot [of places] to play. We feel good
being in Northfield because we're kind of distant. [But] we love
embracing communities and there's a music community in Minnesota
that isn't seen very well. Like, you don't see Unicorn Basement or
Baby Guts or the Connection on the Current. You hear all the big
bands, but there's a really great underground. We like being a
part of that."
Considering that even the bigger bands in Minnesota are still well
in the underground nationally, we're talking about a subset of a
subset here, but that's part of what choosing simpler paths
entails. You could polish your sound, tailor it to some
demographic, and then grind on that for years, waiting for your
big break. Or you could just choose to work with what's around you
- even if it means taking some unorthodox approaches to touring.
(www.citypages.com)