The Music Spectrum Notebook Series digs into my handwritten notes and reviews on older releases still getting my attention.
It’s called Wartime Favorties, and the album cover features what seems like Rosie the Riveter doing lingerie/boudoir photos. It’s a masculine, mechanized, and stylized look (with a nuclear mushroom cloud in the background), even while it is also feminine, seductive, and softly curved.
Judging the album by its cover does tell you a thing or two about Ruby Rendrag’s music. Like Joan Jett, it’s a combination of masculine punk and feminine sexuality—although many of Rendrag’s songs lilt along more like folk than punk. Rendrag has a pop cleanness to the melodies with Suki Kuehn’s cello adding a whole other dimension, augmenting the songs with strings much like Alejandro Escovedo who gets so much rocking out of a fiddle and cello.
Rendrag’s voice is most reminiscent of the indie Kelly Snyder (see below) whose fragile voice and piano combine in a fiercely strong stance against the world that threatens to take her by storm. Rendrag has that same fragile voice that can also escalate to a storm warning.
“Anything You Are” rocks up the folk song, but makes it immediately apparent that there’s a place for the band to enter into this mix. Rendrag’s vocals are double-tracked, and when played live, she would do well to have another female singer to create that same effect. The song then lands into Kuehn’s cello-led hard rock riff.
“Long Way Up” has a nice blues sparkle to a pop rock jam. The highly unmeditative “Meditation” is the kind of meditation I appreciate. “I’m Gonna Go Crazy” has jazzy bounce with great upright bass from Allen Maxwell. “W-26” has a country folk walk. “High and Dry,” the Radiohead tune, comes from an Indigo Girls-like place.
Jenn Franklin’s Errors and Admissions
Like Rendrag, Jenn Franklin is reminiscent of Kelly Snyder. Franklin’s 2006 Errors and Admissions is a 6-track CD with a few good songs and a few mediocre ones—which is probably why I didn’t initially review it. However, after listening to Rendrag and remembering Synder, I couldn’t help but also recalling “What Took You So Long,” Franklin’s lead track which blazes with that fragile intensity of Snyder. Her songs also recall Michelle Branch and Charlotte Martin’s pop moments. In fact, “Impasse 900” makes it clear that Franklin might be a Martin disciple. The songs often employ production elements to raise up her voice to an ethereal space, much like Chasing Furies did.
Reprint: Music Spectrum Review of 2005’s Oxygen from Kelly Snyder
Coming from a fragile place, Kelly Synder’s sings at the piano as if she’s either in a NYC apartment drowning out the city noises (“Nothing’s Ever Right” speaks of “clammy sidewalks” on a rainy day) or in a lake home overlooking the water (“Fall” includes the line “Lookin’ across the bay”). Her Oxygen album (Mother West) finds comparisons to the piano-led tunes of Rufus Wainwright, Charlotte Martin, and Rachel Yamagata. “Rescue Me” hits at Wainwright-like series of concluding chords early in the tune, and periodically throughout, as if the song will be over before it starts which matches the hopeful-turning lyric. A light dance beat is the backdrop for “I Don’t Know,” which has a R&B chorus where Snyder can show a little scat in her vocals. Additional production adds creepy whistling bottle rockets on which increases the ache in the tune. Like vamping over a George Winston piano line, Snyder adds her soulful melody to “So Bad” which deeps down deep into longing.
John Wesley Harding’s Dynablob 3: 26th March 1999, an entire, unedited recording of a show at Berkeley, California’s Freight & Salvage, gave a definitive feel of being at the show—an intimate sound with enough stage banter left as part of the recorded version to capture the moment. While I can testify to this because of actually being at the show, with Patrick Fitzsimmons, I wasn’t at the show but his LIVE The Birthday Shows (2006) appears to have delivered us to show.
And there 
