by Daniel V. Garcia
Daily Lobo
There comes a time in everyone's musical mood when he or she gets a hankering for Bob Dylan-esque lyrical landscapes Ö la "Subterranean Homesick Blues," whether he or she knows it. In the same vein, we all get a twinge of nostalgia for some punk-forerunner music, like MC5 - admit it, you do.
The next time this hits you, check out Violet, a self-described post-modern folk rock band whose eclecticism on its album, The Last Cathedral, conjures up the above pairing in one's mind.
This group doesn't shy away from fuzzy guitar distortion on its more raucous songs, nor is it bashful when playing its country-tinged tunes. In fact, the album features some of the most diverse musicality that one can find as of late. Obviously, a mainstream producer hasn't had the chance yet to pigeonhole the band's sound into a candy-coated and easily digestible formula.
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The result is some songs feature a minimalism like Velvet Underground, and others showcase riff-oriented classic rock that smacks of AC/DC. The mellower tunes are either orchestrated vignettes of heartbreak or lap-steel driven expressions of a dark sentiment.
The pairing of the two musicians, with Jim Barry as the main guitarist and Meredith Minogue as the main singer, has, in all likelihood, led to this diversity. The former plays subdued accompaniment for most of the album, but when it is his time to rock on "Fill You In," he unleashes the dragon as Minogue urges him along in her improvised "So you wanna be a rock 'n' roll star? Listen to what I say. First get an electric guitar and take your time. Learn how to play like this."
Minogue's voice has a haunting quality reminiscent of the Be Good Tanyas' soprano whisperer, Frazey Ford. In addition, one can hear traces of the influence of Sarah McLachlan, Melissa Etheridge and Patti Smith in her alto that sounds as comfortable conveying indie pose as it does spinning old-timey charm.
The songwriting suffers a bit, structurally speaking, as the songs fail to build and release the dramatic tension that is characteristic of fine songwriting. They just seem to end abruptly. That being said, the band, which features many additional musicians who color the music with a variety of instruments, expresses itself in a lyrical mosaic of language and snapshot images that conveys solemnity, but which is also esoteric and obscure. The musicians obviously put great importance into the lyrics, as they devote the majority of the CD insert to them. It's too bad they mostly read like the overly typical unintelligible poetry found at a first-Thursday-of-every-month navel-gazing poetry meeting held in a local coffee shop dive.
If you listen to your music for musicality's sake and you like dissecting the lyrics to songs, get this diverse album. But don't expect it to create an atmospheric mood, for the downfall of a band that plays material that is too varied is that it is hard to recognize the band outside of the context of the album. That is, it will sound like the radio.
