2009.09.01
A couple of good adds from myspace -- Jail, Marcella and the Forget Me Nots
Music is what started MySpace.com's virtual media shower, and it's the only thing that can keep it relevant.
After a few years on the site, I still get a tremendous number of band add requests. Most of them do not impress me, but today I found a couple that I really liked.
Let's start with the Milwaukee, Wisc., band Jail. This band can rock hard, but it understands dymanics and the importance of tempo diversity. The songs combine straight-up rock with elements of cowpunk, garage, psychedelic. The song "All It Was" carves out an early-Radiohead-meets-Toadies sound, with such self-deprecatingly strange lyrics as "I fell out of the cab, and soiled my pants, and nobody cared at all.
Jail tours all over the country, so maybe it will come here, and we can see if its live chops are up to its MP3 standard.
The other band I had to big up this afternoon is Marcella and the Forget Me Nots, led by The Puppini Sisters Marcella Puppini. She bills it as an all-girl post-apocalyptic cabaret orchestra, and that sounds about right to me.
Check out the MySpace page's opening cut, "What Have You Done to Your Face," in which Puppini castigates a friend who went under the plastic surgeon's knife at least one too many times. But the strongest cut is "To The Water," a slow and spooky number, darkened by cello.
According to band publicity, it will release a record in October 2009. Maybe Pippini and cohorts will come over here from the UK for some touring.
