ARTIST: Rasputina
TITLE: Oh Perilous World
LABEL: Filthy Bonnet
GENRE: Rock
BITRATE: 193kbps avg
PLAYTIME: 0h 45m total
RELEASE DATE: 2007-06-25
RIP DATE: 2007-06-20
Track List
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1. 1816, The Year Without a Summer 4:23
2. Choose Me For Champion 2:36
3. Cage in a Cave 3:50
4. Incident in a Medical Clinic 3:52
5. Dranconian Crackdown 4:02
6. Child Soldier Rebellion 3:49
7. Oh Bring Back the Egg Unbroken 3:55
8. Old Yellowcake Breaking News 0:35
9. In Old Yellowcake 4:05
10. We Stay Behind 3:19
11. A Retinue of Moons/The Infidel 7:05
is Me
12. The Pruning 4:18
Release Notes:
Rasputina's steampunk approach to rock & roll -- a trio of cellists influenced
as much by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells as by Marilyn Manson and Kronos Quartet --
is so implausibly bizarre that it would be easy to overlook the band as a
novelty act. Don't. Lead cellist/songwriter/mad witch Melora Creager may play up
the goth queen image to the hilt, with her tightly corseted dresses and dark
eyeliner, but behind the faτade is a strikingly original sensibility that defies
categorization. And comprehension, for that matter. Imagine Oh Perilous World
then as an antiwar protest album made up of a loosely connected song suite
dealing with Mary Todd Lincoln and her blimp armies, Fletcher Christian's
renegade son Thursday, a children's army awaiting air ships that never arrive,
the projected overthrow of Pitcairn Island in the South Pacific, and a faux
heavy metal political campaign chant that states "I feel that I can get behind
heretical ideas and make them real." Oh, Mary Shelley, Osama bin Laden, and
Saddam Hussein make cameo appearances as well. In short, forget the linear,
rational explanations and just bask in the audacity of it all. This is a
universe inhabited solely by Melora Creager. Here three cellists do their best
flailing imitation of Metallica on "Draconian Crackdown" as Creager, alternating
between a Kate Bush coo and a Robert Plant banshee wail, sings about spectacular
suicide explosions. On "We Stay Behind" she sings a sorrowful dirge about a
detached wooden leg that still wears a shoe. On "A Retinue of Moons/The Infidel
Is Me" she leads the band through a punk tango while moaning about "the spores
of resistance." And on "Incident in a Medical Clinic" she adopts the persona of
the crazed Mary Todd Lincoln and sings "Quite unbelievably I want someone to be
sweet to me when I am in absolutely horrible pain." It gets weirder from there.
Oh Perilous World offers the kind of cracked world-view that will either strike
you as inspired eccentricity or insufferable lunacy. In either case, it's a wild
ride made more palatable by a restless musical imagination. Rasputina, to their
credit, remain in a category of their own, sui generis, spinning out their
inscrutable tales with crazed energy and genre-mashing abandon. You're unlikely
to find a stranger -- or more strangely compelling -- album this year.